Recommendation of: Speaking Types into Being: Language Acts, Typological Persistence and Performing Archaeological Space. Round#2

Language Acts, Typological Persistence and Performing Archaeological Land" by Piraye Hacıgüzeller (2025) is a contribution to a forthcoming volume on the role of typology and type-thinking in current archaeological theory and praxis.This volume is edited by the recommenders, and Hacıgüzeller's contribution is recommended based on two independent expert evaluations.A GIS specialist in archaeology, Hacıgüzeller offers a range of critical reflections on categorization and representation of archaeological space.She illustrates how specific spatial types and categories, in general and the "site" category in particular, shape archaeological praxis, notably spatial analysis and imagination.As rightly stressed by the author, spatial categories suffer from issues of vagueness in their definition that are even greater compared to, say, the categorisations used to handle more obviously bounded objects such as artifacts.As a result, the foundational vagueness of spatial categories makes it vital to pay critical attention to how and why certain concepts persist in, and continue to shape, archaeological discourses despite mounting theoretical critique and what may be termed "empirical resistance".Hacıgüzeller here points out that mere "usefulness" in organizing archaeological materials and framing archaeological knowledge-production projects does not provide a complete, particularly relevant or satisfying answer, suggesting that spatial types and categories should instead be regarded as "language acts" (p.5-6).Based on this recognition, the author develops a constructivist, practice-oriented approach to archaeological concepts, arguing that "types do not merely describe material realities; they are constitutive of them" (p. 1).All concepts are human products.This in turn leads to the desideratum to carefully examine "typological language acts" and "the role 'language acts' play in the materialisations of archaeological types" vis-à-vis tangible contexts 1 of archaeological analysis and interpretation.Generalizing types as categories, Hacıgüzeller thereby examines two linguistics aspects of categorization operations in particular:1. Drawing on Gavin Luca's (2019) work -and echoing his chapter included in the same edited volume (Lucas 2022) -Hacıgüzeller advocates for approaching archaeological spatial types not as "stable classifications" but as "relational entities -assemblages that are always in the process of becoming"; 2. Addressing the implications of large language models (LLMs) for her "language act" approach to spatial archaeological categories, drawing in current scholarship in discourse analysis in archaeology and beyond, for example a recent edited volume on Discourse and Argumentation in Archaeology: Conceptual and Computational Approaches (Gonzalez et al. 2023).Framed as a "position paper", Hacıgüzeller's contribution certainly offers much food for thought and will be of interest to all those who are interested in meta-archaeological questions.Firmly grounded in postmodern and gender studies, it raises awareness about the risks and challenges of categorisation as a praxis -more generally and for archaeology in particular.She notably cautions against the risk of excessive stabilisation and fixation, and points to some of related consequences of drawing exaggeratedly on generative intelligence and artificial intelligence-based (computing) technologies.In doing so, Hacıgüzeller's helps to re-activate, and thereby expand and re-situate, Austin's (1962) original theory of speech acts for contemporary archaeological concerns, tapping into its potential to illuminate archaeology as a situated "cultural praxis" (Assimakopoulos 2025) and resonating with recent work on the "literary archaeologist" (Lucas 2019).