Christopher Witmore

Christopher Witmore
Born
💼 Occupation	Archaeologist

Christopher Witmore is an archaeologist and President’s Research Professor of Archaeology and Classics at Texas Tech University. His research focuses on landscapes in Greece over the long term, archaeological theory, thing studies; contemporary archaeology and the Anthropocene; and the relationships between humans and technology.

Education

Witmore earned a BA in archaeology, classics, and geography from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in 1996 and a MA in Landscape Archaeology with Mark Edmonds at the University of Sheffield in 98. A student of Ian Hodder, Ian Morris (historian), and Michael Shanks (archaeologist) he earned a PhD from Stanford in 2005.

Career

Witmore is co-editor of the Routledge Archaeological Orientations series and sits on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Contemporary Archaeology. From 2006 to 2009 he was a postdoctoral research fellow with the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World at Brown University. In 2009 he joined the Department of Modern Languages & Literatures at Texas Tech University where he is the President’s Excellence in Research Professor of archaeology and the head of classics.

Witmore also held a research fellowship at the National Humanities Center from 2014 to 2015. In 2017 he was a Senior Research Fellow with the Centre for Advanced Study at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.

He currently teaches multiple courses at Texas Tech University on topics ranging from archaeological theory, ancient technology, and the archaeology of Ancient Mediterranean societies.

Research and authorship

Witmore is “known for blending in-depth engagements alongside objects with longstanding and pressing questions of human and nonhuman existence. Witmore is among a few influential archaeologists who have been instrumental in reorienting the field from an exclusive focus on a distant past, to a field of interventions into the present, past, and future.” He has written over 80 articles on the philosophy of archaeology, new materialisms, archaeological theory, landscape archaeology, classical archaeology, and contemporary archaeology. He has published four books on these topics including Old Lands: A Chorography of the Eastern Peloponnese, which seeks to renew and transform the ancient genre of chorography. Old Lands, according to the American Philosopher Levi Bryant is a book that “defies categorization, it is part history, part travel diary, part reflection on the present, and part theoretical reflection on archaeology and how archaeology ought to be conducted.” Witmore also co-authored the 2012 book Archaeology: The Discipline of Things along with Bjørnar Olsen and Michael Shanks (archaeologist), which according to Michael Brian Schiffer “exhorts the reader to embrace the materiality of archaeology by recognizing how every step in the discipline’s scientific processes involves interaction with myriad physical artifacts, ranging from the camel-hair brush to profile drawings to virtual reality imaging.” More recently, Witmore co-authored Objects Untimely: Object-Oriented Philosophy and Archaeology with the object-oriented philosopher Graham Harman. According to the philosopher Jon Cogburn, "Objects Untimely develops a radical object-oriented theory of archaeology while simultaneously providing a novel account of time’s dependence upon objects."

Witmore is also known for writing “the founding manifesto of symmetrical archaeology.” Symmetrical archaeology recasts “archaeology as the study of things and not the study of the past or past peoples.” As Witmore puts it, “archaeology is the study of things with an aim to understand pasts and their relevance for life.”

Select Publications

• Symmetrical Archaeology: Excerpts of a Manifesto. C. Witmore World Archaeology 39(4): 546-62 (2007)
• Archaeology: The Discipline of Things C. Witmore (with B. Olsen, M. Shanks, and T. Webmoor) (2012)
• Archaeology in the Making: Conversations through a Discipline C. Witmore (co-edited with B. Rathje and M. Shanks) (2013)
• Archaeology and the New Materialisms. C. Witmore The Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 1(2): 203-24 (2014)
• Archaeology, symmetry, and the ontology of things. A response to critics. B. Olsen (with C. Witmore) Archaeological Dialogues 22(2): 187-197 (2015)
• Old Lands: A Chorography of the Eastern Peloponnese C. Witmore (2020)
• Objects Untimely: Object-oriented philosophy and archaeology C. Witmore (with G. Harman) (2023)
• Anthropoiesis revisited: Hominization through the incorporation of nonhumans. C. Witmore The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Archaeology Oxford University Press: 1215-233 (2024)

See also

• Archaeological theory
• Chorography
• Metamedia
• Michael Shanks (archaeologist)
• Bjørnar Olsen
• Graham Harman

Sources

• Govier, E. (2022). "Pre-critical archaeology. Speculative realism and symmetrical archaeology". Archaeological Dialogues. 29 (2): 188–199. doi:10.1017/S1380203822000241.

• Harris, O.J.; Cipolla, C.N. (2017). Archaeological theory in the new millennium: introducing current perspectives. London: Routledge. Search this book on

• Witmore, C. (2007). "Symmetrical Archaeology: Excerpts of a Manifesto". World Archaeology. 34 (9): 546–62. doi:10.1080/00438240701679411.

• Witmore, C. (2019). "Symmetrical archaeology". Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology. New York: Springer: 978–93.

• Witmore, C.; Caraher, W.; González-Ruibal, A.; Hanink, J. (2021). "Reviewing Christopher Witmore's Old Lands: A Chorography of the Eastern Peloponnese". Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology. London: Routledge, 2020. 34 (1): 109–31. doi:10.1558/jma.43204.

• Zakaitis, J. (October 2011). "Interview: Jonas Zakaitis talks with Christopher Witmore". The Federal (2): 11–20.

External links

• Texas Tech University website
• Christopher Witmore’s academia.edu profile
• National Humanities Center Interview
• Author: Christopher Witmore

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