Chapter 10: Octopodology and Dark Amphorae: alien archaeologies, reflexivity, and the non-human afterlives of objects in the sea

When Christopher Columbus presented his argument for the existence of lands across the Atlantic Ocean, the “eminent men of Genoa” apocryphally replied that to the west were only “the mist of darkness” (Abulafia, 2019, p. 610). This self-limiting conception of the world resulted in Genoa missing the European “discovery” of the western continents to the benefit of Spain. Anthropology and archaeology have their own ‘mists of darkness’, self-imposed limits or blindness due to culture, gender, or social status. There are aspects that observers cannot perceived due to their proximity to the subject. Anthropology sought to address this through the “reflexive turn”, where researchers seek to identify and understand their own inherent biases (Hymes, 1999).