The Archaeology of Common Sense

Part of: Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Rather than colloquial wisdom, Clifford Geertz argued, common sense was culturally constructed, historically contingent, and in need of querying. As such, like myth or art or knowledge, common sense was a cultural system in need of anthropological attention. Though his concern was for the ethnographic present, investigators of ancient and historic remains have much to contribute to common sense's analysis. Their expansive time frames can reveal the processes that work so assiduously to turn history into human nature. In this session, contributors are asked to identify and interrogate contemporary commonsensical notion—about gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, time, etc.—that find their way into scientific studies and/or popular presentations of the past. This naturalization of the cultural is not without consequences, and contributors may also deliberate about the socio-political effects, whether intended or not, of reifying common sense. Finally, as a counter to universalizing and presentist narratives of the past, contributors are encouraged to offer evidence from their contextualized archaeological and bioarchaeological studies that highlight the varied ways to be human.