Andrew Jones serves currently as lecturer in archaeology and joint coordinator of the master’s program in Art and Representation at the University of Southampton.  He has authored a number of books and articles tied to notions of memory and materiality and works primarily on British Neolithic sites, researching biographies of inhabitation, and analyzing settlements and social networks.  His most recent work explores the connections among prehistoric rock art sites, social memory, and landscape.

               Between 1999 and 2007, Jones produced a body of work that both exemplified and helped to drive the trend toward studies of memory and materiality in archaeology.  His understanding of object meaning revolves around metaphor, a subject broached in many of his works including a 1999 article in which he approaches the Neolithic pottery of Orkney as representative of materially similar mortuary practices, citing comparisons in a mode similar to that of Ian Hodder.  His other 1999 articles reflect a fascination with past human understandings and interpretations of color.  That fascination led him eventually to compile Colouring the Past, an edited volume in which color -- after having taken the backseat for much of archaeology’s history -- takes center stage (1999a and Bradley and Jones 1999).  Published in 2002, Colouring the Past contains chapters that explore the relationship between object color and social systems.  Jones’s introduction makes clear that the volume aims to reconnect art history and archaeology by approaching color from an anthropological perspective, enriching both disciplines in the process (Jones and MacGregor 2002: 3).

               2002 was an important year for Jones in terms of publishing, as another of his books, Archaeological Theory and Scientific Practice, saw release that year as well.  Jones notes in that work the need for a reassessment of archaeological practice based on recent interpretivist approaches.  He makes clear there his objection to the notion that a purely scientific archaeology is possible or even desirable, repeating a three-part argument throughout the course of the work: (1) that knowledge -- even scientific knowledge -- is created within cultural contexts, (2) that we ought, therefore, to try to understand the processes in which knowledge develops, and (3) that we should recognize the dynamic nature of knowledge as it pertains to us (the archaeologists) and to our subjects.  He encourages, furthermore, the development of object biographies, emphasizing the notion that objects and object classes, like human beings, have life spans and possess some level of agency.  Jones returns to Neolithic Orkney here, following the changing association of ceramic types and tempers to changing contexts, linking them thus to changing social identities (2002: 143).

               Jones’s most recent book, Memory and Material Culture, saw publication in 2007.  He mentions in his preface having suffered a stroke while writing, and he notes the profound influence the experience had on the crafting of the work.  He lost the ability to walk as a result of the stroke, and the three-month recovery period afforded him an opportunity to reflect on the nature of the partial manuscript (2007: xi).  He completely retooled many of the ideas he had initially planned on presenting, though he does not, unfortunately, clue his readers in as to the nature of the changes.  Whatever the case, Jones makes several strong points throughout the work.  He argues that objects do not act simply as a mode of external symbolic storage, emphasizing instead that they interact with human beings, whose sensual and intellectual experiences differ with every exposure.  He downplays the notion of biological memory as storage, offering in its place a process of memory.   He further argues that memory (and thus its mnemonic objects) is inextricably intertwined with identity.  In other words, objects invoke memories, revitalizing or modifying notions of identity.  Objects serve, in the process, to link entities together in networks, helping to forge group identity.  Jones refers to objects as “indexes” throughout the course of the work, highlighting their function as the “framework . . . around which we . . . articulate and organize ourselves” (2007: 224).  The concept, he believes, can allow archaeologists to better understand relationships between artifacts, places, and people.

               Jones’s influence in the field is difficult to gauge at this point due to the relative recentness of his contributions.  It seems, however, that his perspective may well thrive given the current “processual plus” intellectual climate.  His approach, though highly contextual, does not fall completely into the humanistic realm, allowing a good deal of room for scientific and statistical methods as well as for the systematic study of social networks, all mainstays of anthropological archaeology.

Works Cited

Jones, A
1999a    Local Colour: Megalithic Architecture and Colour Symbolism in Neolithic Arran Oxford, Journal of Archaeology, 18(4), pp. 339-350.

Jones, A.
1999b    World on a Plate: Ceramics, Food Technology and Cosmology in Neolithic Orkney, World Archaeology, 31(1), pp. 55-57.

Jones, A.
2002       Archaeological Theory and Scientific Practice, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.

Jones, A. and MacGregor, G.(Eds.)
2002       Colouring the Past: the Significance of Colour in Archaeological Research, Berg: Oxford.

Bradley, R. and Jones, A.
1999       The Significance of Colour in European Archaeology, Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 9 (1), pp112-114.