ABSTRACT
Violence occupies a strange terrain in archaeology. It forms the celebrated heart of accounts of certain periods, while in other time periods, it is underplayed or ignored. Some authors worry that archaeologists romanticise history by ignoring violence, while others argue that an obsession with aggressive masculinity drives singular accounts of antiquity. In this chapter, the authors consider how alternative theoretical approaches open new ways of thinking about the causes and effects of violence in the past and what this might mean for today and tomorrow. How does violence emerge in specific historical ways? How does it work with and against non-humans? How is violence both structural and interpersonal? How does violence react to and draw upon potential as much as actual realities? To think through these challenges, the authors introduce the philosophical concepts of the virtual and the actual and consider case studies from European medieval iconoclasm, Indigenous critiques of archaeology, and nineteenth-century California. The chapter explores whether extending our understanding of violence to include non-humans risks undermining our ability to find specific humans culpable for their actions, proposing that archaeologists need to clearly distinguish between historical explanation, on the one hand, and blame, on the other.
