The Origin of Memory Studies: Proust, Bartlett, and Halbwachs
                Memory and materiality studies attempt to develop some understanding of collective notions of the past by approaching objects, structures, and landscapes as nodes of social memory, pregnant with overlapping human interpretations.  Researchers in this area of study trace their intellectual heritage back as far as the late nineteenth century, citing influences as diverse as Marcel Proust, the French novelist and intellectual, Maurice Halbwachs, the French philosopher and sociologist, and Frederic Bartlett, the English experimental psychologist, among others.  Proust’s semi-autobiographical Remembrance of Things Past, a grand study of involuntary memory composed of some three thousand pages of fictional text, has influenced both early and contemporary scholarship on the topic.  Proust depicts numerous involuntary memory events during the course of the novel, the most famous of which involves a string of childhood memories elicited by the taste and smell of a tea-soaked madeleine, a small scallop-shaped French cake (48-51).  Despite its emphasis on individual memory, Proust’s work has aroused the interest of the community of material culture studies due to its treatment of objects as items capable of eliciting complex and sometimes profoundly meaningful individual responses.  As Halbwachs and Bartlett note, however, individual memory exists within a certain social context and thus overlaps in many ways with the memory of others.  Bartlett’s early twentieth-century experimental psychological research revealed not only that individual memory operates within social context, but that the overlap among personal memories and historical understandings can serve as a subject for systematic research (Saito 2000).  Presaging Bourdieu’s notion of habitus, Bartlett developed the concept of the schema, a dynamic and dualistic framework, ruled as much by social conditions as by individual idiosyncrasies, in which individual memories take shape (Bordieu 1977; Saito 2000).  Halbwachs echoes Bartlett in his 1950 work, On Collective Memory, arguing also for consideration of social context, but adding that differing contexts result in differing patterns of behavior (a notion only a few intellectual steps from Benedict Anderson’s concept of “imagined communities”).  Halbwachs, Bartlett, and Proust together cleared the path for studies linking collective memory and material culture, but few studies of significance would follow until the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries.

Memory Meets Material Culture
                As a result of the work of Paul Connerton, a social anthropologist at Cambridge University, and of David Lowenthal, a geographer at University College London, collective memory reemerged as an avenue of scholarly research during the 1970s and 1980s.  Drawing on Proust and Bartlett as well as on more recent architectural, archaeological, and landscape studies, Lowenthal connects social memory, landscape, and material culture in a 1975 article, arguing that the past pervades the present in forms that transcend individual nostalgia and thus require formal analysis.  The article underscores the role of landscape features and material culture as nodes of meaning, both for people of the past and -- perhaps more importantly -- for those of the present.  Lowenthal worked those and other thoughts on memory, landscape, and material culture into a monograph published ten years later.  That work, entitled The Past is a Foreign Country, proved pivotal for memory, landscape, and material culture studies, as it places the development of individual identity between the three concepts.  He argues not only that the three interact though individuals, resulting in identities, but that individuals often shape their own identities by consciously appropriating appealing histories.  He further argues that modes of identity development in the West changed significantly between the medieval period and the present.  Memory and materiality researchers often cite Paul Connerton’s work, How Societies Remember, alongside Lowenthal’s due to their overlapping subject matter.  Connerton’s work takes a different tack on social memory, however, approaching the topic from a comparatively anthropological perspective.  Connerton highlights several important devices of social memory, pointing out that it transmits from one generation to the next through learned bodily movements, or “habit memory.”  Social groups, he notes, perpetuate habit memory via tradition and ritual performance.  Though Connerton does not place great emphasis on the role of material culture, he recognizes that such traditions involve the ritual use of objects, and a number of contemporary memory and materiality scholars have used the connection as a base upon which to theorize about the nature of artifacts in certain contexts.  Connerton’s and Lowenthal’s works revived discussion regarding social memory and material culture and inspired a generation of archaeologists seeking fruitful alternatives to overly-positivistic processual approaches.

The Emergence of Materiality and the Reemergence of Peirce
                Postprocessual archaeology, a postmodern manifestation unique to the discipline, emerged during the 1980s in response to the perceived rigidity of the prevailing processual archaeology (Hodder 2005).  Freed from the intellectual confines imposed by processualist modes of thought, the new generation of archaeologists explored numerous theoretical avenues during the 1980s and 1990s.  Of those, landscape archaeology and material culture studies -- once the domain of museum anthropology and historical archaeology -- proved particularly fruitful.  Memory and materiality studies arose as the aforementioned approaches experienced increasingly greater utilization and as postprocessual archaeologists came to reject the use of structural approaches to archaeological interpretation.
                Structuralist archaeology tapped Saussurian linguistics, treating artifacts as signifiers (representations of specific meanings) that possess little or no actual relation to that which they signify (Hodder 1982, Shanks and Tilley 1987, Tilley 1991).  Ian Hodder, an early proponent of structuralist archaeology, came to doubt the framework’s usefulness due to the Saussurian division between signifier and signified.  In a 1986 work, he argues that artifacts often act as both sign and object, making the Saussurian division untenable.  The arbitrary nature of the structural division reflects the notion of an internal mind separate from an external world, an ancient duality implicitly adopted by structuralists and processualists alike but considered false by scholars of opposing inclination.  The division places distance not only between people and objects, but between researchers and the subjects of their study, leading to a false sense of objectivity -- an important poststructural critique, which is broadly folded into postprocessual approaches.
                Merlin Donald, a cognitive neuropsychologist, developed during the 1990s an approach to memory and material culture that moves away from structuralist interpretations, while still retaining some aspects of the mind-body duality (1991; 1998; Jones 2007).  Donald’s scheme considers objects as forms of external symbolic storage (ESS), a precursor in some ways to the comparatively multivocal notion of materiality.  Both ESS and materiality theory assert that objects serve to assist human memory by promoting certain traditions from one generation to the next.  The ESS approach treats objects as containers of certain ideas and emphasizes authenticity and clarity of recall while materiality, drawing upon theories of metaphor put forth by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, treats objects as capable of bearing numerous meanings for every individual with which they interact (Jones 2007).  Alfred Gell’s understanding of materiality, one in which objects serve as agents supplying a multiplicity of meanings to human interpreters, represents materiality’s intellectual extreme, but illustrates well the point that objects mean different things to different people and that those meanings can change dramatically even during the course of a single lifetime (1998).  Gell’s argument rests on the semiotic of the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, a program revived only very recently by archaeologists and art historians interested in developing a theory of signs more robust than that offered by Saussurian linguistics. 
                Ironically, Peirce designed his semiotic theory during the period in which Ferdinand de Saussure and Proust produced their most influential works, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  Materiality scholars prefer Peircean semiotic for its comparative flexibility.  Peirce conceived of signs as possessing three potentially overlapping forms: icon, symbol, and index (Misak 2004).  Peirce’s icon produces meaning through reproduction, as a “slippery when wet” street sign does by providing an image of a car swerving as a result of wet road conditions.  Peirce’s symbol resembles Saussure’s signifier, taking into account the arbitrariness of certain signs, such as those formed by western characters.  His index, however, holds the greatest interpretive power so far as materiality scholars are concerned, as it accounts for meanings that come about through experience.  Lightning and thunder bear an association that does not result from reproduction (lightning does not “resemble” thunder) or from codification (no western lexicon links lightning as signifier and thunder as signified), and thus it serves as an index (Jones 2007).  Memory and materiality researchers seek to get at the multiplicity of meanings -- of indexical associations, that is -- for individual objects and object patterns, especially those tied to the transmission of historical knowledge.  Theirs is a particularistic enterprise, as they must first build detailed contextual reconstructions of cultural and environmental conditions before attempting to enter the minds of their often long-dead subjects.  Context, then, limits prehistoric studies of memory and materiality as much as it enables similarly inclined studies of artifacts appearing in the document era.

Contemporary Memory and Materiality Studies
               The burgeoning field has produced a number of studies, and despite the fact that prehistoric context can be more difficult to arrive at than that of its historical counterpart, no shortage of studies in prehistoric memory and materiality exists.  In his 2002 work, The Past in Prehistoric Societies, Richard Bradley concludes that the orientation of burials attributed to the Linear Pottery Culture of Neolithic central Europe possesses some significance due to the similar directionality of burials and houses.  The heads of the deceased in this case face the same direction as the doors of houses at associated settlements.  Building on Bradley’s argument, Andrew Jones asserts in a 2007 publication that for the people of the Linear Pottery Culture, burial patterns seem to index “an idealized notion of . . . settlement” (2007: 104).  Jones further notes that burials not conforming to the rule of common orientation usually sit near a particular house, with the head of the deceased directed toward that house, indexing, perhaps, a place of origin.  The theme of origins plays an important role in memory and materiality studies.  That theme manifests itself as genealogy in a recent edited-volume chapter written by Katina T. Lillios.  Lillios presents the results of her analysis of prehistoric Iberian slate plaques there, concluding that the plaques acted as genealogical mnemonics.  She arrives at this conclusion based on the distribution of plaques and their iconography, citing the appearance of certain motifs in tomb groups and identifying distributional spreading of motifs from core areas.  Design motifs in this case do not only index genealogy through the passing of designs from one generation to the next, they serve as symbols of political identity and likely as components of personal identity.
                Maya archaeologist Rosemary Joyce deals with personal memory in the same volume, but she taps the notion of object history in order to do so.  Joyce challenges the assertion that “name tag” inscriptions on Classic Maya earspools always reference the names of the people they are associated with in burial contexts.  She notes that researchers have discovered a number of earspools originally associated by inscription with people other than those with whom they are found.  Building on the object-biographical research of Janet Hoskins, Joyce surmises that such earspools served as “the focus for the creation of . . . new [memories],” documenting ownership history and representing negotiation among noble families (2003: 116).  Case studies abound for the more recent historic period as well, many of the most interesting covering twentieth-century topics.  One such study, Dean Saitta’s Archaeologies of the Collective Action, approaches the recent vandalism of the Ludlow Massacre Monument in Colorado from the perspective of public memory.  The monument, erected in the early twentieth century by the United Mine Workers Association following the massacre of labor union members at the site, holds significant meaning for the Ludlow descendant population as well as for regional labor groups.  Rather than making the monument a subject of forensic investigation by thoroughly investigating potential culprits and motives, Saitta treats the incident as a single component in the ongoing discourse of monumentality by exploring the interaction between the vandalism and the affected population's understanding of the past.
                Victor Buchli and Gavin Lucas’s 2001 volume, Archaeologies of the Contemporary Past, contains some similarly framed historical studies, including Laura Wilkie’s essay regarding the appropriation by certain living groups of symbols unearthed via archaeological excavation.  Wilkie explored the forms of social memory revolving around these early twentieth-century sites (Riverlake Plantation in Louisiana and the Zeta Psi fraternity house at Berkeley) using community consultants.  Ultimately she found that her consultants worked to shape the legacy of the institutions they represent not only during their interviews but outside of them as well.  Living Zeta Psi fraternity brothers emphasized their chapter’s avoidance of “monkey business,” while the local media focused on the archaeological evidence of massive drunken parties (2001: 114).  Living ex-sharecroppers of Riverlake Plantation portrayed their experiences differently along generational lines.  Younger consultants generally presented plantation life within the context of the civil rights era, focusing on racism.  Older consultants, on the other hand, offered a depiction they guessed that Wilkie would be comfortable with, “a past in which happy children fished and chased turtles . . . and attended small one-room schools” (2001: 112).  Her older consultants’ recollections of Riverlake Plantation, surfacing as a result of discussion surrounding the archaeology of their original home, follow the pattern of involuntary memory (though certainly filtered) as described by Proust.  Riverlake Plantation -- the notion, the landscape, and the artifact collection -- acts, furthermore, as an indexical sign in the Peircean sense.  Wilkie’s study serves, then, to illustrate the debt owed by this emerging field to Proust and Peirce.

Links

SAA Archaeological Record, Special Edition: Archaeology and Historical Memory
Andrew Jones at the University of Southhampton
Stanford Archaeolog (an archaeology blog), Memory Section
John Sutton (philosopher at Macquarie University): Social Memory, Collective Memory, External Memory

Works Cited

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Donald, Merlin
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Lillios, K.
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