Neolithic farmers did not have centimeters or Celsius, for example! So, to some extent, this quantification of the past feels very much like a colonization of the past: rendering the past amenable to subjugation within the terms of colonial power (Foucault talks about this quantified control during the 1665 plague outbreak in London archaeologist Stephen Mrozowski similarly discusses the colonialism of cartography). However, these quantified attributes are modern, colonial, capitalist, industrial, enlightened inventions - quantification as a form of capture.

It isn’t an entirely ineffective method of producing a type of knowledge, as you can sometimes find patterns and (ir)regularities that convey some meaning, for sure. This is painfully reductive: attempting to understand a people on the basis of a few sets of numerical attributes. More dubiously, however, archaeologists endeavor to understand the thoughts, feelings, political structures, belief systems, and economic and subsistence practices of archaic populations based on the diameter of ceramic bowls in centimeters, on the spatial distribution of settlements in kilometers, or changes of temperature in degrees Celsius - a noble ambition, but are these contemporary systems of measurement the best way to understand archaic sentiments? Much of the recording methodology is irreconcilably subjective, such as recording the color and composition of dirt. After a while this undertaking starts seeming incredibly absurd - in a good way, but perhaps not totally self-aware. As one might imagine, excavations entail moving dirt around, recording the distribution of human-affected objects within the dirt, extracting them from the dirt for further measurement in the lab, recording various attributes (size/morphology, quantity, etc.). I had been doing archaeological fieldwork, as I still do. SS: Measurement is a very appropriate starting point! It’s actually where I got started on this “archaeology of temperature” endeavor. that are inevitably going to follow in this discussion. In light of that question, could you give a short overview of your work? I think that will provide some context for the litany of temperatures, large/weird numbers, archaeological and scientific concepts, etc. This, in turn, opens up a key question for discussion: what does it actually mean “to measure”? I’ll throw one of these ideas out there: that scientific systems of measurement might reveal more about themselves - as systems of measurement - than about what they actually measure. I’m excited to get straight into these ideas that are at the root of both of our projects, but I realize we may need to provide context for what are some big and potentially abstract concepts. LB: I recently listened to an interview you did on Montez Press Radio where you talk about the ideas behind your dissertation, “The Material Culture of Temperature: Measurement, Capital, and Semiotics.” I really enjoyed it, and it was a great reminder of how you and I have needed to sit down and talk about the overlaps in our interests.

In the summer of 2017 he was awarded an Art-Science residency grant from the National Science Foundation and Pratt Institute. He has had various projects featured in art galleries in New York and Los Angeles over the past decade, including a recent collaboration appearing at the Queens Museum as part of their Chance Ecologies exhibit. He has conducted archaeological fieldwork centered on historical ecology and conservation in Scotland, Iceland, and Italy. He served as a Quantitative Reasoning Fellow at Baruch College from 2014 to 2016. His research focuses on the methodologies and materials employed in the collection of environmental data, examining the epistemological history of climate modeling and algorithmic governance more broadly. from the Anthropology Department at the CUNY Graduate Center. He has a book coming out in Fall 2021, with Routledge, loosely based on the ideas explored here. Scott Schwartz is a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology.

Scott schwartz