Wheels of Time Entangled

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O R I G I N A L P A P E R

Wheels of Time: Some Aspects of Entanglement Theory

and the Secondary Products Revolution

Ian Hodder

Published online: 6 July 2011 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011

Abstract This paper responds to that aspect of Andrew Sherratt’s writings that argued for

building specifically archaeological theory. In describing a theory of entanglement, I have

focused on the archaeological sensitivity to the complexities and practical interlacings of

material things. The theory argues that human–thing entanglement comes about as a result

of the dialectic between dependence (the reliance of humans and things on each other) and

dependency (a constraining and limiting need of humans for things). Andrew’s discussion

of the role of the wheel in his Secondary Products Revolution is a good example of howhumans and things have become entangled so that, over the long term, we have been

channeled down particular evolutionary pathways.

Keywords Entanglement Dependence Dependency Wheel Secondary products

Neolithic

I first met Andrew when I went to Cambridge as a graduate student in 1971. We were both

at Peterhouse and both students of David Clarke. That did not necessarily mean very much

other than attending some joint seminars in David’s rooms. But I was always grateful to

Andrew as he did take an avuncular interest, and I remember many visits to his house in

Guest Road, both to parties and to long evenings sitting round a table with others and

talking, and feeling very inadequate in response to Andrew’s quickness, knowledge, and

wit.

When David died I found myself editing his memorial volume with others, and reading

for the first time Andrew’s submission for that volume—his first piece on the secondary

products idea. I thought it was quite brilliant then, and still do now re-reading it. It showed

an amazing range and depth of knowledge, and a really breathtaking grasp of large scale

processes. The idea of the Secondary Products Revolution was his most ingenious andmost enduring contribution.

I. Hodder (&)

Department of Anthropology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA

e-mail: [email protected]

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J World Prehist (2011) 24:175–187

DOI 10.1007/s10963-011-9050-x



We kept in touch over the years, and I always valued his perspective and advice. We

often disagreed, but he was always generous in spirit. When I started work at Catalhoyuk in

Turkey, I asked for his support and he gave it unstintingly for over a decade—writing

reports and references and sitting on our Steering Committee.

The last time I saw him, he had come with his wife Sue to visit, at last, Catalhoyuk. Hisexcitement and enjoyment were palpable. He was positively bursting with energy and wit,

just irrepressibly bubbling. He was on a tour linked to the ‘origins of milk’ project, and

seemed interested and engaged, rather than disappointed, that the evidence seemed to be

pointing away from a late secondary products date, at least for milk (Evershed et al. 2008).

Again his generosity and openness struck me.

I realize, looking back, that when I wrote about European prehistory, as in The

domestication of Europe (Hodder 1990), I was to some degree writing for him. That is also

true of The leopard’s tale (Hodder 2006). I knew he would understand, and appreciate,

even if he disagreed. I knew he would see where the argument was coming from, would

understand the engagement with prehistory. With him gone, I feel more at a loss. I will

miss his commentary, his reaction, his teasing sideliner.

I want to write something now that I have written for him. I want to try and write

something that he would have been intrigued by, smiled at, made fun of.

In doing so I intend to respond to various aspects of Andrew’s writings. In the intro-

duction to Archaeological theory: Who sets the agenda? (Yoffee and Sherratt 1993), the

editors argue that archaeological theory should be built from archaeological data and

should be linked closely to archaeological understanding, rather than borrowing endlessly

from other approaches. I want to discuss briefly and initially an ‘Entanglement Theory’

approach that I believe builds a particularly archaeological understanding of the socialprocess, although it is certainly influenced by external sources such as Brown (2001, 2003),

Latour (1990, 1993, 1996, 1988) and Actor Network Theory (Law and Hassard 1999; see

also Webmoor and Witmore 2008). Postprocessual archaeology was reproached by some

for borrowing too much from, and being a poor cousin to, cultural anthropology (Shennan

2003). But equally, some archaeologists in the neo-evolutionary vein can be critiqued for

trying to ape biologists. I would like to follow Andrew, and indeed David Clarke, in

arguing for a specifically archaeological theory (see Sherratt 1998, p. 701).

Entanglement Theory also responds to the impetus in Who sets the agenda? towards

taking the good bits from various archaeological perspectives in building towards an

integration of the contemporary fragmented archaeological scene. In his writing in thatvolume and elsewhere Andrew took an independent middle-ground stand, seeing the

positives in different perspectives while chastising their self-referential self-importance.

In describing very briefly here what I mean by ‘Entanglement Theory’, I am also

responding to Andrew’s concern that we return to ‘Grand Narrative’. While I remain

highly suspicious of attempts to explain ‘the origins of agriculture’ and so on, I do see the

need to be able to build a general theory—a unified theory that deals both with Deetz’s

(1977) ‘small things forgotten’ and the large-scale and long-term processes that so fasci-

nated Andrew. In his own article in the 1993 Who sets the agenda? volume he wrote:

The question ‘what happened in (pre)history’ can be answered both at the small scaleof the petites histoires of objects and occupation levels, and at the level of the grand

re cit of larger themes. Archaeology’s objective should be to link these two domains,

neglecting neither the one nor the other, in a way that goes beyond both ‘history’ and

‘evolution’ … resisting the imposition of inappropriate models from outside its own

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field but participating in the construction of an understanding that reaches beyond its

disciplinary boundaries (1993, p. 128).

Entanglement Theory is just a small attempt to respond to that ambition set out by

Andrew.

Some Ideas in Entanglement Theory

In trying to outline briefly some aspects of what I mean by Entanglement Theory, I will

return to some of Andrew’s concerns that developed from his work on the Secondary

Products Revolution (Sherratt 1981). I will not go over his Secondary Products argument

again, but I do want to point to the general structure of the argument as encapsulated in

Fig. 1. I want to consider how Entanglement Theory would look at the process shown in

the figure and reconceptualize it.Entanglement Theory has developed from ‘thing theory’, which centred on the word

‘thing’ or ‘ting’, which in origin, in Old Frisian and Old English, means an assembly or

parliament, as Olsen (2003) has noted. A thing or ting was a day or matter that brought

people together. So the focus on thing, as opposed to object or material, is on how things

bring people together. The theory tries to take things seriously (Latour 1996; Webmoor and

Witmore 2008). Many archaeologists and social theorists over recent decades have come to

accept that people depend on things not solely in terms of subsistence, technology and

exchange but also in terms of social relations and structures, meanings, ideologies and

embodiments. So it has become commonplace to say that archaeologists and social the-

orists increasingly take things seriously. But it is archaeometrists, material scientists andexperimental and behavioural archaeologists that have taken things seriously in another

Fig. 1 The secondary products revolution as envisioned by Sherratt (1981)

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sense—the dependence of things on people. Things need maintenance and care, they run out

and fall apart. Their physical materiality and chemical processes engage people in complex

systems of relationships with other people and other things—that is, people and things get

trapped in entanglements that themselves direct the way further change can occur.

In summary:

• People depend on (materials, people, symbols) things

• The dependence entails dependency because things depend on people and other things

• Dependence ? dependency = entanglement.

Entanglements produce selective change because the entrapment of entanglement limits

and channels innovation. I wish to make a distinction between dependence and depen-

dency. By dependence I mean the contingent reliance of humans and things on each other.

But sometimes that reliance involves entrapment and constraint, and in such a context I use

the term dependency (as in economic development or psychological literature). Thus,

humans rely on and have a dependence on cereals, but when the plants become domesticthey cannot reproduce without humans so humans have to work at their reproduction; this

entrapment or ensnaring I call dependency.

Dependence

As already noted, material culture theorists and those anthropologists and archaeologists

engaged in understanding materialities have long explored the ways in which people depend

on things (Miller 1998; Meskell 2004). The notion that human society is produced in its

relationship to things goes back to early ideas of ‘man the toolmaker’, to Marxism and theview that ‘man makes himself’ (Childe 1936), and to the adaptationist and systemic

arguments made in processual archaeology. More recently, the human cognitive depen-

dence on things has been championed (Renfrew 2005). There has been much recent dis-

cussion, deriving ultimately from Mauss’s (1990) The Gift of the ways in which the

exchange of objects produces different social forms and strategies (Wiener 1992; Strathern

1988), particularly in colonial and post-colonial encounters (Thomas 1998). The impact of

Bourdieu and others on archaeological understanding of daily practice as socially consti-

tutive has been impressive (e.g. Shanks and Tilley 1987), as has the archaeological impact

of Heidegger’s notions of Dasein, present-at-hand and dwelling (e.g. Thomas 1998), and

Latour’s notion of ‘delegation’ (e.g. Olsen 2003). In all these and other ways, it has becomeroutine for archaeologists to claim that human society, human agency and human con-

sciousness depend on things. There is increasingly an attempt to move away from subject/

object dichotomies, and to explore the ways in which society is constituted through things.

This ‘turn to things’ is part of a wider set of moves in the social sciences and humanities

(Domanska 2006; Ihde 1999; Preda 1999). Within this broader debate there is a commonly

held assumption that the materiality of social life stabilizes and fixes the fluid relations

between humans. To take two of many possible quotes:

The only assignable difference between animal societies and our own resides, as I

have often said, in the emergence of the object. Our relationships, social bonds wouldbe airy as clouds were there only contracts between subjects. In fact, the object,

specific to the Hominidae, stabilizes our relationships, it slows down the time of our

revolutions. For an unstable band of baboons, social changes are flaring up every

minute… The object, for us, makes our history slow.

(Serres 1995, p. 87)

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It is this durability which gives the things of the world their relative independence

from men who produced and use them, their ‘objectivity’ which makes them with-

stand, ‘stand against’ and endure, at least for a time, the voracious needs and wants

of their living makers and users. From this viewpoint, the things of the world have

the function of stabilizing human life, and their objectivity lies in the fact that …(we) can retrieve their sameness.

(Arendt 1958, p. 137).

Dependency

In my view, this assumption (that within the human dependence on things, things stabilize

human relations) is incorrect and comes about from not taking things seriously enough. The

assumption that things fix and slow down human relations derives from the one-sided view

that people depend on things. Things are seen, from the perspective of daily human con-

sciousness and social interaction, as static and enduring. In contrast to this human-centered

approach, we are less used to discussing the ways in which things depend on humans. We

are less used to arguing in the social sciences that the human dependence on things entails

other things and other people. It is the archaeo-chemists, archaeo-physicists, archaeome-

trists, behavioural archaeologists and experimental archaeologists who know that far from

being fixed, things decay and fall apart. In doing so they generate social life and speed it up.

Archaeologists are able to look at the relationships between people and things over the

very long term. There is one very clear conclusion that emerges from this perspective. The

object has not slowed down history. Quite the opposite. Over the, say, 150,000 years

during which anatomically modern humans have spread over the globe there has been anexponential increase in the mixing of human society and things—objects made by, or made

use of by, humans. From stone to bronze to iron to the great expansions of the industrial

age into coal, uranium, plastic, cement, and then to the silicon in microprocessors, our

dependence on things has increased. And yet—and this is a type of large-scale generality

that Andrew would have relished—over the same period there has been an exponential

increase in the speed of social change. In the Palaeolithic, styles or cultures of homoge-

neous human activity lasted relatively unchanged for millennia. From the great expansion

of human–thing inter-dependence in the Neolithic agricultural revolution the speed of

change increased so that phases and styles lasted hundreds of years. Since the industrial

and computer revolutions we see phases of months and moments.Why have social theorists got it so wrong and how can we explain the relationship

between increased human dependence on things and the increased rate of social change?

Social theorists have long accepted that material culture can be given different meanings in

different contexts. The meaning of things is not seen as fixed, but dependent on social

context. But the recent shift in social theory away from the semiotic and interpretive and

towards practice, materiality and embodiment has foregrounded the ways in which social

life is embedded in or is indebted to things. In my view, the error that has occurred in

discussions of things is that, despite the claims of the theorists, things themselves are not

taken seriously enough. There has been exploration by many historians of science andtechnology (Latour 1996; Lemonnier 1993; Shapin and Schaffer 1985) of the ways in

which things—the stone, bronze, iron, plastic and silicon—have material characteristics

that enter into relationships with people. Discussion of affordances by Gibson (1979; and

see Knappett 2005) and of performance characteristics by Schiffer (1999) promotes study

of the ways in which the properties of things actively engage people and other things.

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Things fall apart. Things themselves decay. And things depend on other things and on

other people, and there are often breakdowns in this dependence. Somewhere in the

gradually extending network of human dependence on things, something is going wrong.

Anyone who has spent a day at an airport because a flight has been cancelled due to ‘metal

fatigue’, or an ‘electrical fault’ will know of the real ways in which the falling apart of things enters into human relationships. Andrew and Sue flew to Turkey when they visited

Catalhoyuk. Then they hired a car. Hire cars in Turkey seem to have a particular propensity

to fall apart. And Andrew and road maps did not seem to get on together at all! Things

resist, decay, fall apart, run out, need replacing. Social theorists are incorrect to assume that

things are fixed and stabilize, at least if looked at over longer spans of time than the

immediate interactions studied in most ethnographies. The fact that things keep falling

apart creates dependency, as humans have to work harder to maintain things that they

depend on.

Taking an archaeological example from my own work, during the Pre-Pottery Neolithic

in the Middle East, society became very dependent on the house. Made of unfired mud

brick, these buildings were important centers of economic, social and spiritual life. Many

scholars have noted the ways in which the house in this and other contexts ‘created

society’. Indeed these early village societies in the Middle East can be described as ‘house

societies’ in the terms of Levi-Strauss (1982; Hodder 2006; Joyce and Gillespie 2000;

Carsten and Hugh-Jones 1995). It was membership in the house, and the passing down of

the house and objects in the house, that created the long-term relationships that lie at the

heart of delayed return agricultural systems.

And yet at Catalhoyuk we see how the house kept falling apart. The walls were not

stable at all. They needed endless care. They tended to lean over, pushed by the weight of the mound around them, so they were endlessly shored up and rebuilt. Outer walls adjacent

to refuse areas had to be doubled or trebled in width to avoid decay and erosion. The

interior walls had to be re-plastered every few months, and the more they were re-plastered

the more they slumped and had to be shored up and strengthened. There were continual

problems with vermin and fire and sooting of walls and so on. There was an endless

process of maintenance. In construction and maintenance, the house created society by

forcing people into sets of relationships and dependencies. The carrying of mud to

re-plaster walls and floors on a monthly basis, the obtaining of reeds to fix roofs, the

re-building of walls also implied using up local resources. We have found quarry pits near

the site in the early phases—later, people had to travel farther to get mud, plaster, clay.Perhaps the transport of materials became too onerous and in the uppermost levels of the

site frequent re-plastering of walls ceased and thicker layers were used. New types of

houses were built with thicker walls and larger bricks. These changes were linked to many

others in the uppermost layers. The speed and scale of social and cultural change increased.

People were caught in a dependency on mud brick. They fixed the disintegrating mud brick

houses and the problems with multiple layers of plaster by changing the plaster type and

building much thicker walls. They did not abandon the social focus on houses—the initial

response to the problems was to fix the situation while retaining the centrality of the social

house.

Entanglement

I have talked so far of dependence and dependency, and these together produce what I

describe as entanglement (see Thomas 1991 for a related but different use of this term). As

we have seen, many activities carried out by humans have on-connections or entailments.

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I do action ‘a’, but because of the sets of practical, social, conceptual networks within

which that action is embedded, action ‘a’ implies, entails, necessitates on-costs. These

constraining networks may involve scarce resources, the need to pay back labor in

exchange for that given in producing action ‘a’, the need to reciprocate gifts, the need to

repair and conserve parts, the impetus to protect investments, and so on.Another way to look at this is in terms of material and social temporalities. By material

temporalities I mean the seasonal round, the various animal, plant and human life cycles,

but also the time it takes for clay to dry, the time it takes for brick walls to start to

deteriorate, the time it takes for metal to heat and be hammered, etcetera. These material

temporalities have to be linked to social materialities. We have to ‘wait for’ the crops to

grow and ripen, we have to ‘wait for’ the winter to pass and the spring growth to start. Or

we try to ‘put off’ the time when the house has to be renewed, or schedule our lives so that

we can go and get some obsidian and so on. Our temporalities become increasingly linked

to material temporalities.

It is important to note that this entrapment is not entirely in the social realm. I am not

clear if Latour would say today that there are non-humans that are not hybrids with

humans. Latour rejects culture–nature oppositions and focuses on the mixing of humans

and non-humans. Indeed the whole of Actor Network Theory is built upon the move away

from fixed essentialist dualisms such as agency and structure, materiality and sociality,

human and non-human. Such distinctions are understood as effects or outcomes. ‘They are

not given in the order of things’ (Law 1999, p. 3). In my view this goes too far. When the

ice melted at the end of the Pleistocene it had a widespread effect on human society. There

was some relationship with the emergence of settled villages and domestication of plants

and animals. Even if this effect was varied in different parts of the globe, and even if we donot understand the effects adequately, this climate change, unlike our own, was inde-

pendent of humans.

Pierre Lemonnier took Bruno Latour’s symmetrical approach to task for its tendency to

overlook material constraints and focus on sociological issues. In his response (Lemonnier

and Latour 1996), Latour agreed that pure, asocial material constraints did not exist in his

perspective. For him the lack of dualism was a positive aspect of Actor Network Theory

(see also Knappett 2005, p. 32). For me, however, to bring everything into the social risks

losing one of the main motors of change—the limited unfixed nature of things in

themselves.

There are many such changes in natural cycles, in daily, monthly, annual, decadal andmillennial rhythms, that affect humans as external forces. There are many processes of

decay and loss and depletion that impinge on human society but which are outside society.

Because humans and non-humans are thoroughly embroiled in each other, these external

natural changes entangle humans, they force responses and adjustments.

But perhaps the main attraction of the entanglement idea is the sense of being caught in

a web. The idea of entrapment is key because it tries to bridge the divide between

materialism and social constructivism. I do not want to reintroduce a materialism or an

environmental determinism, or an ecological imperative. Social theorists and social

archaeologists have been successful in appropriating ecological and environmental con-cerns into the socially constructed sphere. But this success does not hide the fact that real

world issues entangle us in entrapments and necessities. Much as we engage in these

necessities through our socially constructed worlds, they nevertheless draw us into their

webs of interconnections. We can get out of these seamless material–social webs, but

extricating ourselves involves high costs. So the notion of entanglement as described here

allows a materialism but embedded within the social, the historical, the contingent.

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In such a context, a wide range of theory, including Human Behavioral Ecology models,

is useful in the archaeological understanding of the traps that people are led into. For

example, such models look not only at net return rates but at sustainable yield under

exploitation (Shennan 2003, p. 160). They look at conservation and tending measures. As a

result, archaeologists can gain quantified information on how people have to work tomaintain a resource (Bird and O’Connell 2006).

The notion of entanglement has parallels with systems theory or dialectical change. But

it differs from systems and the dialectic by being less structural and oppositional.

Entanglement as defined here is messy and highly contingent. It is very difficult to pre-

dict—because so highly interconnected in so many dimensions and directions. Entangle-

ment is also practical and everyday—dealing with real forces as much as imagined ones.

Perhaps the main difference between entanglement and systems or dialectical approa-

ches is that these approaches tend to be working with the system as a whole. It is the

overall system, and its parts and dialectical relationships, that is sought. The study of

entanglement starts differently, with the smallest units that make up the system. It weaves

together the relationships of humans and things by following the threads and the depen-

dencies. It sees the structures and systems as products of these threads and webs, of the

links between humans and things. On the other hand the approach is not bottom-up versus

top-down, since all approaches are infused with theory at the start, and Entanglement

Theory is no different. Rather the starting place differs in emphasis—concrete objects,

things, humans and their entanglements rather than systems, subsystems, dialectical rela-

tionships, structural oppositions and the like.

Selective Change

One interesting characteristic of this theory is that humans are not at the center of social

change. Things too, as they fall apart and have their own interactions and dependencies,

enter into social change. Change partly comes about through unintended, contingent,

accidental interactions. And yet the theory asserts that social change is directional—but not

in the teleological sense of moving towards greater social differentiation, centralization of

power, complexity; and not in the 19th century sense of improvement and progress. Rather,

change is directional because humans and their social arrangements are so dependent on

and invested in things that the immediate response to things falling apart is to fix them—

that is not to go back to the beginning and start again but to find a solution that fits intowhat has been built. Change moves ‘forward’ rather than back, in the direction set by the

traps of entanglement—the obligations, rights, investments in which people and things are

tied.

To take an example from the contemporary world, our entanglements with things have

led to the suite of problems we call global warming. We have become entangled with the

world in such a way that one of the unintended and unforeseen on-connections is that

climate is changing rapidly. In facing these problems humans are seeking solutions that

include cutting carbon emissions from factories and cars and reducing car and plane use.

But contemporary society is so dependent on cars and trucks and trains and planes that wedo not even conceive of getting rid of them entirely. It would not be possible to go back to

a time before the car or some form of mechanized transport. Thus, in the Bay Area in

California where I live, the prices of houses near Stanford University and Silicon Valley

are extremely high. But the university and high tech companies are dependent on low-wage

workers to clean their offices and feed their employees. These workers cannot afford to live

close by so they travel huge distances by car and bus—there is little in the way of public

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transport or a train system. The whole social fabric and economic functioning of the Bay

Area is dependent on house price zoning and on travel of low-paid workers largely using

cars from zone to zone. This social and economic system cannot work without the car.

Reducing emissions and trying to alleviate the situation with better public transport is one

thing, but radically changing direction and getting rid of the car is ‘inconceivable’. In thisway change is directional—directed by the specific sets of social, economic, symbolic and

material entanglements in which they have become trapped.

There is, then, a fittingness to things, humans and their entanglements. It would not have

been possible to have a harmonium in the Palaeolithic. This is because everything depends.

Even if someone had envisaged a harmonium in the Palaeolithic, and even if they had

managed the task of getting the ivory for the keys and the brass for the reeds, and even if

they had managed to develop the skills needed to assemble a harmonium, and had managed

to organize their lives so that they had time to do all this and learn to play the instrument,

even if they had done all this, the harmonium would not have been copied because it had

no social role. It did not fit in the Palaeolithic. There was no social need for harmony using

the 8-note scale, for exact notes, for the musical expertise, for the specialization of musical

skills, and so on.

Fittingness is due to the inter-connectedness of things—that fact that objects and people

are dispersed into each other. Thus, people enter into social and material relations with

each other, and objects entail each other, and objects and people entangle each other. We

might talk of these as ‘materialities’, that is, particular forms of and conceptions of human–

thing co-dependencies (Miller 1998; Meskell 2004). New traits are selected for not because

of some externally defined sense of optimality, and not usually because they increase

reproductive success, but because they fit within the special material entanglements at handor because they produce a new form of entanglement that fits with other entanglements in

overlapping sets or webs. And new traits often come about as solutions to problems as

things fall apart or otherwise transform social lives.

We are so entangled in cars that we cannot ‘go back’ to live without them. We could say

the same thing about wheeled vehicles more generally. Indeed, archaeologists have dis-

covered the first wheels in the late Neolithic in Eurasia. Ever since their discovery and

spread through the world there has been no option of ‘going back’.

Wheels and Entanglements with Secondary Products

The theory briefly outlined above encapsulates various different components of current and

recent archaeological as well as non-archaeological theory. The notion that people depend

on things is of course the key notion in most archaeological theories, whether one is talking

of tools of adaptation, or symbols on which humans depend for communication, art,

meaning, religion, psychology. So we might take the example of the human dependence on

the wheel, which Andrew discussed as part of the Secondary Products Revolution. The

wheeled cart emerged in the fourth millennium BC in Europe and at more or less the same

time in the Middle East (Bakker et al. 1999). The wheel, initially a wooden solid, was usedin two and four wheeled carts, often pulled by oxen. It may have been used in warfare, but

also in transport, and had a symbolic significance in burials (Piggott 1983).

But we are less used to exploring how the properties of things—how they perform, how

they decay and transform—enter into the social relationships of people. Taking things

seriously allows us to consider how the continued existence of things entails maintenance

to stem the flow of decay and collapse. That a wheel continues to function depends on the

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activities of humans. The solid early wheels must have been heavy and difficult to

manoeuvre. In the third and second millennia spoked wheels appeared widely, including in

China and Egypt. But their edges must have worn out against hard surfaces. So for the

wheel to continue it had to be provided with a protective covering such as leather, and later

a metal rim or hoop. So the wooden wheel came to depend on other things—on metal rims,and on people—for it to continue in existence.

Thus in using things, and depending on them, other things and people are entailed. The

more people use things, the more they have to work harder (thus producing dependency) in

obtaining, making, maintaining, discarding things. The dependence of people on things

(the wheel), entails further things (such as metal rings, never mind axles, pins, roads, cattle

or horses) and further people (blacksmiths, road makers, cattle breeders etc.) in depen-

dency relations.

Thus people get involved in a system of relationships through their dependence and

dependency on things. In a way, the whole Secondary Products system mapped by Andrew

is such a set of relationships between people and things. But the focus on entanglement

differs from the focus on system. Perhaps the main attraction of the entanglement idea is

the sense of being caught in a web. Much as we engage in the world of material necessities

through our socially constructed worlds, we are nevertheless drawn into the webs of

dependencies and interconnections. Real world issues entangle us in entrapments and

necessities.

These entanglements and entrapments are historically and regionally specific. Thus, in

the early use of the wheel, it was embedded within a particular entanglement that

emphasized transport of goods, burial ritual, bog deposition. There is a close link to the use

of draught animals and to the emergence of the plough, as well as to the potter’s wheel. Butby the third and second millennia in Anatolia and the Middle East, the wheel had also come

to be embedded in a different entanglement. As a spoked wheel it gradually became part of

a fast horse-driven chariot, central to warfare, heroism and manly prestige.

What then causes change in the wheel over time? We have long come to see the

difficulties and dangers of the various approaches to change that have been espoused in

archaeology over recent decades—whether adaptive, functional, Marxist, social evolu-

tionary, agency and so on. It is because of these difficulties, particularly when dealing with

the long-term large-scale changes so beloved of Andrew, that people have turned recently

to neo-evolutionary approaches. These have again been shown to have their own limita-

tions. Even in the most sophisticated and least reductionist of these approaches, such asthose based on dual inheritance theory—as in the work of Shennan (2003)—there remains,

in my view, too much dependence on biology.

I do, however, think it is worth trying to develop a non-biological evolutionary theory

which retains the positive ideas surrounding fit (what I called fittingness above) and

selection. Clearly it is inadequate to argue that the wheel emerged because someone had

the intention to make a wheel, although that might be part of the answer. But the wheel is a

simple idea, and people had presumably often had the thought of a wheel. That there is no

wheel in the Palaeolithic is because a wheel would not have fit in the particular entan-

glements of the Palaeolithic. There was no conception of that type of transformation of theworld—and there were no axes to cut trees, no regular routeways and no draft animals.

There were not the long-term, delayed-return social and ideological systems that would

have underpinned this type of labor investment.

So the wheel was not fitting in the Palaeolithic, or in the early Neolithic in Europe and

the Middle East. There are model wheels in pre-Hispanic New World contexts, but

wheeled vehicles were not used in transport. The wheel did not fit in America, because of

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the lack of draft animals. But it was fitting in the context of the late Neolithic and Bronze

Age changes that Andrew called the Secondary Products Revolution. Andrew saw all this

as a response to population growth, and the expansion of settlement into secondary

environments. The limitation of such a view is that presumably people could have chosen

to limit population increase and restrict expansion. Other scholars have seen the emergenceof the Secondary Products complex as a response to shifts in social structure from lineage-

based to exchange-based systems, or as a response to greater centralization of power and

control of production and exchange. But these approaches run the danger of teleology—it

does not seem adequate to say that people invented the wheel because they wanted to

invent the wheel.

And so some evolutionary selection model seems attractive. But in the case of wheels, it

would be difficult to demonstrate using archaeological evidence that wheels increased in

usage and frequency because they enhanced the reproductive fitness of certain wheel-using

individuals. But it does seem that we can talk of the selection of the wheel and its increased

frequency without any reference to biology. Instead of optimality or reproductive fitness or

success, we can refer to the fittingness embedded within entrapments and entanglements.

What I mean by this is that the reason the wheel is selected for in the fourth millennium

and not in the 14th millennium BC is because it did not fit technologically, economically,

socially and ideologically in the entanglements of the 14th millennium. The task of the

archaeologist is to discover, through careful contextual analysis, why the wheel did fit so

that it became selected in the fourth millennium. Here the full range of adaptive and social

and cultural questions that archaeologists have come to ask are relevant, and Andrew’s

work provides many of the answers.

But few have looked at the thing—the wheel in itself—in these terms. What techniquesdid it take to make a wheel and fix it to an early cart? How did axle technologies develop in

tandem with the adoption of and changes in wheel types? Andrew did study the differences

between fixed axle and rotating axle systems in his paper on wheels (Sherratt 1997). But

what loads and speeds were required and possible? What was the link to the type of animal

traction (cattle or horse), and the type of weaponry and type of fighting? How did these

carts themselves produce a certain form of transport and warfare? What types of labor and

expertise and materials were required in obtaining components, fitting them together, using

the cart and maintaining it? What specific entailments and entanglements were involved in

getting access to the skills and resources? What experimental work has been done on the

effectiveness of such carts? An entanglement approach would ask that we take these cartsand wheels more seriously as things. What were their properties, and how would they have

depended on people and other things to be used and reused?

We would then have to ask what entanglements existed prior to the emergence of the

wheel? How did people cope without carts, and what aspects of that coping would have

inhibited the selection of the wheel? And what shifts occurred to make the selection

possible? To what extent is it right that the emergence of the potter’s wheel made the

selection of the transport wheel more possible? How did the wheel fit into and produce new

assemblies of people and things?

Conclusion

It is remarkable that a discipline so dependent on and focused on things, should have

developed so little discussion of things themselves—their properties, characteristics—and

so little discussion of the demands made by things on humans. I hope that in returning to

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things, within a broad theory, we can respond to some of Andrew’s desire that we get back

to broad and specifically archaeological theories.

It has not been my purpose here to expound a new fully-fledged theory of things, but

rather to respond to Andrew’s work by exploring large-scale issues, integrating different

perspectives, and exploring some of the particular characteristics of archaeology. In par-ticular, archaeology is defined by its focus on material culture, on everyday things, rather

than on texts and words. Social archaeologists have over recent decades increasingly taken

things seriously, from a wide variety of perspectives. But the discipline remains bedeviled

by an opposition between objectivity, science and evolution on the one hand, and society

and history on the other. As part of that divide, the increased social concern with things

has, with the exception of scholars identified above, paid little attention to the material

grain, the practical temporalities of things. As a result there has been a lack of integration

between, for example, materiality studies and materials science.

What I have tried to do in this paper is show that if we break across this divide there is a

large reservoir of fascinating issues to be researched and explored. I have tried to find a

language to talk about these interactions between humans and things, and in particular have

focused on entanglement—the webs of obligations, practical routines, social strategies,

material necessities and conceptual schemes—that tie humans and non-humans together

into assemblies. I have tried to define dependencies of humans on things, the ways in which

things depend on people, the resulting networks that trap and determine social action, and

the selective processes that lead to change.

But I can hear Andrew beginning a ceaseless stream of punning about thing theory and

string theory, archaeologists entangled and entrapped in their theoretical webs, wheels of

theory circling back on themselves and getting nowhere, cartloads of discarded theoriesand a new one to add to the pile—and so on. So I had better stop.

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Wheels of Time Entangled