INVASION ONTOLOGIES - Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities - page 192

alternately as 'archaeology of the contemporary past' or 'archaeology in and of the
present' (Harrison, 2011: 141-161). Laurent Olivier, for instance, analysed the
Languedoc village of Oradour-sur-Glane, brutally liquidated by the Waffen-SS in
June 1944. French attempts to memorialise the site, to preserve it 'as it was', led
merely to 'the fabrication of hybrid constructions that belong as much to the
present as the past' (Olivier, 2001: 183). Indeed, argued Olivier, any site, any
assemblage that physically bears witness to human contact, is intrinsically archaeo-
logical, in that its elements represent 'a diversity of past temporalities', intersecting
and contaminating each other (ibid.: 187).
Archaeologists typically address past cultures through artefacts: the enduring
traces of human presence. This focus applies equally to zooarchaeology, archaeob-
otany and microarchaeology, which primarily examine biota to reconstruct their
intersections with human cultures via their material remains. Artefacts, however,
are ontologically defined not simply by their materiality, but by their manifestation
before human observers (Hodder, 2001: 189). As Olivier asserts: 'Archaeological
remains are inseparable from our present . . . it is they who need us if they are to
exist' (Olivier, 2001: 180).
Yet if it is ontologically true that we see arthropods as transhistorical objects, rather
than individuated subjects, then they too can be said to possess specific archaeological
features within historical landscapes. Indeed, what drew me to archaeological theory
was the discipline's historicising emphasis on interpreting conjunctions of space, place,
event and object. Archaeology, as Gavin Lucas puts it, 'is a science of new entities,
new assemblages' (Lucas, 2012: 265). Translating the twinned stabilising forces that
hold assemblages together, he suggests that - in archaeological terms - the Deleuzian
operation of coding equates to enchainment: semiotic operations linking the
constituent objects. Concurrently, territorialisation equates to containment, defining
a bounded site which perpetuates the assemblage (ibid.: 199-202). It is precisely these
paired operations - semiotic linkages and biogeographical boundaries - which define
ecologies both in scientific and historical discourse.
Furthermore, contends Lucas, historical materiality stands in an ambiguous
ontological relationship with 'crude' physicality. Drawing on the work of phenom-
enological archaeologists, he argues against materiality as a static property of
artefacts and their archaeological contexts. Rather, he posits a dynamic of material-
isation, of becoming in the Deleuzian sense. For Lucas, ontology is perpetually
(re)constituted both in sensory and relational terms, 'a process in which objects and
people are made and unmade, in which they have no stable essences but are
contextually and historically contingent' (ibid.: 166).
This is where Snell's specimen No. 35 crawls back into the picture. In
nineteenth-century Australia - whether outside Adelaide in 1850, or in a Victorian
privy in 1863 - redback spiders suddenly became visible. We read onto that
visibility a rhetoric of ecological invasion: the spiders appeared where they had not
been before. As arthropods leaving scant material remains, we will likely never
know - in an 'objective' sense - whether or where they existed prior to colonisa-
tion. But our presumptive ontology of spiders as transhistorical objects intuits that