who sets the agenda_ (new directions in archaeology)-cambridge university press (1993)

8/22/2019 Who Sets the Agenda_ (New Directions in Archaeology)-Cambridge University Press (1993)

1/150


2/150

Before the 1960s, archaeologists did not much concernthemselves with "theory": archaeology was an uncontro-versial procedure for reconstructing the past. The rise ofprocessual archaeology introduced a concern for explicittheory and methodology, linking the subject to generalizinganthropology as a model of scientific rigor. More recently, aspart of the wave of post-modernism, post-processual archae-ologists have controverted the scientific pretensions of thesubject by situating it in the context of present-day politicalaction.

This volume takes stock of the present position, mindfulof the importance of archaeology as an academic subject andthe growing scale of archaeological activity throughout theworld. It asserts the real achievements of the subject inincreasing understanding of the past. Without rejecting theinsights of either traditional or more recent approaches, itconsiders critically the issues raised in current claimsand controversies about what is appropriate theory forarchaeology.

The volume looks first at the process of theory building inarchaeology and at the sources of the ideas employed. Thefollowing studies examine questions such as the interplaybetween expectation and evidence in ideas of human origins;social role and material practice in the formation of thearchaeological record; and how the rise of states should beconceptualized; other papers deal with the issues of ethno-archaeology, visual symbols, and conflicting claims toownership of the past. The message that emerges is thatarchaeologists should be equally w ary of naive positivism inthe guise of scientific procedure, and of speculation aboutthe unrecorded intentions of prehistoric actors.


3/150


4/150

Archaeological theory: who sets theagenda?


5/150

NEW DIRECTIONS IN ARCHAEOLOGYEditorsFrancoise AudouzeCentre de Recherches Archeologiques,Meudon, FranceRichard BradleyDepartment of Archaeology, University of ReadingJoan GeroDepartment of Anthropology, University ofSouth CarolinaTim MurrayDepartment of Archaeology, La Trobe University,Victoria, AustraliaColin RenfrewDepartment of Archaeology, University ofCambridgeAndrew SherrattAshmolean M useum, University of OxfordTimothy TaylorDepartment of Archaeology, University of BradfordNorman YoffeeDepartment of Anthropology, University of ArizonaWendy AshmoreDepartment of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania


6/150

Archaeological theory:who sets the agenda?

Edited byNORMAN YOFFEEUniversity of Arizonaan dANDREW SHERRATTAshmolean M useum, University of Oxford

CAMBRIDGEUNIVERSITY PRESS


7/150

Published by the Press Syndicate of the University of CambridgeThe Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge CB2 1RP40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA10 Stamford Road , Oakleigh, Melbourne 3166, Australiawww.cambridge.orgInformation on this title: ww w.cambridge.org/9780521440141 Cambridge University Press 1993First published 1993Reprinted 1995, 1997A catalogue record for this book is available from theBritish LibraryLibrary of C ongress cataloguing in publication dataArchaeological theory: who sets the agenda? /edited by Norman Yoffee and Andrew Sherratt.p. cm. - (New directions in archaeology)Includes index.ISBN 0 521 44014 91. Archaeology - Philosophy. 2. Archaeology - Methodology.I. Yoffee, N orman. II. Sherratt, Andrew. III. Series.CC72.A65 1993930.r01-dc20 92-25825 CIPISBN-13 978-0-521-44014-1 hardbackISBN-10 0-521-44014-9 hardbackISBN-13 978-0-521-44958-8 paperbackISBN-10 0-521-44958-8 paperback

Transferred to digital printing 2005


8/150

Contents

List of igures page viiiList of contributors ixIntroduction: the sources of archaeological theoryNorman Yoffee and Andrew Sherratt 1PART I THE SOCIAL CONTEXT OFARCHAEOLOGICAL THEORY 11

1 Limits to a post-processual archaeology(or, The dangers of a new scholasticism)Philip L. Kohl 13

2 A proliferation of new archaeologies:"Beyond objectivism and relativism"Alison Wylie 20

3 Am bition, deference, discrepancy,consumption: the intellectual backgroundto a post-processual archaeologyChristopher Chippindale 27

P A R T I I A R C H A E O L O G I C A L T H E O R YFRO M T H E PA L A E O L IT H IC T O T H E ST A T E 37

4 Ancestors and agendasClive Gamble 39

5 After social evolution: a new archaeologicalagenda?Stephen Shennan 53

6 Too many chiefs? (or, Safe texts for the '90s)Norman Yoffee 60

PART II I CASE STUDIES INA R C H A E O L O G I C A L T H E O R Y A N DPRA CT ICE 7 9

7 When is a symbol archaeologically meaningful?Meaning, function, and prehistoric visual artsKelley Ann Hays 81

8 Re-fitting the "cracked and broken facade":The case for empiricism in post-processualethnoarchaeologyMiriam T . Stark 93

9 Comm unication and the importance ofdisciplinary communities: who owns the past?Tim Murray 105

PAR T IV EPILO GUE 11710 The relativity of theory

Andrew Sherratt 11911 Archaeology: the loss of nerve

Richard Bradley 131Index 134


9/150

Figures

4.1 Asian mod el for the dispers al of all life, 6.6including humans (Matthew 1915) page 40 6.74.2 Independen ce and human origins since

1940 42 7.14.3 The track for vicariant human origins

(Croizat 1962: Fig. 78), constructed by 7.2joining up fossil findspots 43

6.1 Evolutionary step-ladder 616.2 "Our contemporary ances tors" 63 7.36.3 Examp les of Sumerian "city-se als" (from

Legrain 1936) 66 7.46.4 Comp arison of Ubaid and Uruk sacred

architecture (from Heinrich 1982) 686.5 Uruk period "colo nies" in the middleEuphrates (after Surenhagen 1986) 69

Possible evolutiona ry trajectories 72"Real" and "potential" inequality(chiefdom v. state) 73Plan of Level VLB of atal Hiiyiik(Mellaart 1967: 9) 85"Shrine" room of atal Hiiyuk. Level VLB,room 8, north and east w alls (Mellaart1967, Fig. 35) 86Kiva mural from Pottery Mound in NewMexico (Hibben 1975, Fig. 38) 86Plan of Homol'ovi I, a fourteenth-centurypueblo on the Little Colorado River(Adams 1991) 87


10/150

Contributors

RICHARD BRADLEY STEPHEN SHENNANDepartme nt of Archaeology Department of ArchaeologyUniversity of Reading University of SouthamptonCHRISTOPHER CHIPPINDALE ANDREW SHERRATTMuseum of Archaeology and Anthropology Ashmolean MuseumCam bridge University of OxfordCLIVE GAMBLE MIRIAM STARKDepartme nt of Archaeology Department of AnthropologyUniversity of Southampton University of ArizonaKELLEY ANN HAYS ALISON WYLIEMuseum of Northern Arizona Department of Philosophy

University of Western OntarioPHILIP L. KOHL JDepartment of Anthropology NORMAN YOFFEEWellesley College Department of Anthropology

University of ArizonaTIM MURRAYDepartment of ArchaeologyLa Trobe University


11/150


12/150

Introduction: the sources ofarchaeological theoryNORMAN YOFFEE andANDREW SHERRATT

AbstractArchaeological theory is not independent of the problemsthat need to be solved: it arises out of particular problemsand articulates them with others. This volume exploreshow widely discussed bodies of theory relate to the majorproblem-domains studied by archaeologists.There has never been a unified school of archaeology: justas today, the subject has always been characterized bycompeting theoretical stances that often arise from differentbodies of data and attendant problems of interpretation.

If "archaeology" is more than a word that completelychanges its meaning according to context, however, thereshould be some common ground among its practitioners invarious branches of the discipline. One expects somecommunity of ideas and approaches, especially an explicitunderstanding of how "appropriate theory" is matched to thevarious problems with which archaeologists have to deal.

Typically, however, "theoretical schools" have arisen andclaimed to have a privileged status in determining whatconstitutes valid explanation in archaeological research, andthe recent literature shows that this is still the case. Inhistorical perspective, such schools are clearly seen not onlyas grounded in partial bodies of empirical material but alsoas reactions to preceding theoretical positions and are them-selves likely to be superseded.Despite the evident dangers of advancing universalprescriptions, however, a significant part of the explicitlytheoretical literature in archaeology today consists ofpolemical claims to novel and exclusive sources of truth.Thus, "post-processual" archaeology stigmatizes all earliermodes of explanation as inadequate - not because they arelimited by particular types of evidence, but because they

are fundamentally misconceived. These earlier approachesare characterized as "behaviorist," "functionalist," "posi-tivist," or "evolutionist" and are seen as fatally flawedbecause they fail to consider "cognition," "structuration,""the individual," and "the arbitrary nature of the sign."Moreover, adherents of this school assert that their agendarepresents the only way forward to a theoretically soundmodern archaeology.

Rather than launch a "post-post-processual archaeology,"this volume examines the claims of various archaeologicaltheories against a wider historical and geographicalperspective of archaeological work. We intend, thus, toconsider both a representative sample of traditional archae o-logical problem-domains as well as to examine a variety ofnewer issues that confront archae ologists.

This volume is particularly timely in view of the funda-mental changes affecting the role of archaeology in societytoday. The status of archaeology in the universities isuncertain and, in many cases, under threat. The relation ofarchaeology to its sister disciplines (sociocultural anthro-pology, history, classics), to its "parent organizations" (e.g.,the American Anthropological Association), and to fundingagencies necessitates practical consideration of archaeologyas an autonomous academic subject. Archaeologists alsoface the repatriation of collections as yet unanalyzed, aredenied excavation permits, and must battle looters forcontrol of archaeological sites (Kintigh and Goldstein 1990).

Then, all over the industrialized world, the "heritagephenomenon" has placed archaeology in a central role inproviding local sources of identity. Ancient sites are visitedby vast numbers of people and hence are increasinglyprotected, and interpreted to the public. Much of thepresentation of archaeological material is geared to theinstant appreciation and visual stimulation demanded by thevideo generation; like fast-food, there is a "fast-past." W hilebooks for the mass market may naturally choose toemphasize visual images rather than verbal arguments andconcepts, archaeologists cannot ced e rights of interpretationto the Rupert Murdochs of the communication world.

Under these circumstances, archaeologists mustespecially avoid a retreat into obfuscatory and introvertedarguments that have decreasing reference to problems ofinterest about the past. Furthermore, while view s of the pastare inevitably "theory-laden" and relative to the concerns ofthe present, this does not mean that archaeologists shouldchoose to manipulate the past for their own purposes.Archaeologists must and do strive to see what happened inthe past as objectively as they can while attempting torecognize w hat motivates certain kinds of investigations butnot others.

Archaeologists now deploy increasingly sophisticated


13/150

Norman Yoffee and Andrew Sherratt

means towards the acquisition of hitherto unobtainable dataneeded to understand life in the past. We do not seek toreduce the past to the mechanical application of a naivepositivism dressed up as scientific procedure (in whichmethodology is confused with theory); equally we do notbeliev e that criteria of testability and falsification should beabandoned in favor of speculations about unrecordedintentions of knowledgeable actors in the past in whichanyone's opinion is as good as anyone else's.

The goals of this volume, therefore, are not to set a newagenda for archaeological theory, if by that is meant arejection of traditional and important problems and existingarchaeological activities: archaeologists have reason tocelebrate successful research into important segments of thehuman past and the development of many persuasive andinteresting accounts of social organization and socialchange. We shall consider what sorts of theoretical contextsare appropriate for the explanation of archaeologicalproblems - as well as which theoretical claims are specious.We propose to identify those areas (within the scope of thisvolume) in which archaeological theory remains to be built,and what are the means by which we can get on with the job.

Our contributors deal with a wide range of archaeologicaltheories that are adumbrated further in this introduction. Thefirst section considers the attractions of theory-building inthe context of the archaeological community. The secondsection focuses upon the appropriateness of theories thathave been used to explain respectively the biogeographicspread of human populations in the Paleolithic, the "culturallogic" of societies that neither are based on hunting-gathering nor are states, and the rise of ancient states andcivilizations. The third section presents case studies on theuse and abuse of empirical methods in ethnoarchaeology, inthe interpretation of visual symbols, and that sort out thevarious claimants to ownership of the past. An epilogue onthe relativity of archaeological theory and the nature ofarchaeological imagination concludes the volume.

The origin of this volumeMost of the papers in this volume were written for asymposium (bearing the same title as this volume's) held atthe 10th annual meeting of the Theoretical ArchaeologyGroup (TAG ) on 14 Decem ber 1988 at Sheffield University,UK. Thanks to a British Academy grant secured by AndrewFlemming, we were able to fund the travel of overseasparticipants to the symposium. Prior to the TAG meeting,most of the symposiasts met at Wolfson C ollege, Oxford, todiscuss our papers and the agenda for the symposium andprojected volume. We acknowledge here the grant from theBritish Academy and express our appreciation to Andrew

Flemming and to the President and staff of Wolfson Collegefor supporting the symposium and so making this volumepossible.

The idea for the symposium germinated in Oxford overlunches at which the editors (and itinerant friends) regularlydiscussed the state of archaeological theory and especiallythe latest post-processual writings. We were concerned notonly with what was being said by post-processual archae-ologists but also, and perhaps m ore interestingly, with why itwas being said. In particular, as archaeology students of the1960s in the USA and the UK, respectively, that is, the

floruit of the "processual" archaeology, we were surprisedthat "processual" archaeology was of any immediaterelevance to archaeologists in the late 1980s, much lesshad such a pejorative connotation. To us, "processual"archaeology was an episode in the history of archaeologythat had had a demonstrable effect on archaeological theoryand practice but whose wretched ex cesses were as clear as itsaccomp lishments. We also found it significant that adherentsof the post-processual school based much of their criticismof processual archaeology on new domains of socialtheory outside archaeology itself and in this there wereobvious parallels to processual (or "new archaeology")practices.

We thus decided to convene a symposium around thequestion of where did archaeologists find theory. In this wesaw ourselves not opposed to the post-processual camp,since we wanted to place the most recent generations ofarchaeological schools of theory in intellectual and socio-logical perspective. Post-processualism served as a point ofentry, therefore, in a wider-ranging investigation of thesources of archaeological theory and the practice of theory-building in archaeology.

For our symposium we wanted to gather archaeologistswho were engaged in different kinds of archaeology. Thisincluded not only archaeology of different levels of socio-cultural complexity (and in this volume there are papers byGamble on the Paleolithic, Yoffee on chiefdoms and earlystates, and Shennan on societies betwixt and between thosetwo categories) but also archaeology as practiced in variousparts of the world and by archaeo logists of different socialbackgrounds and educational experiences (in this volumeTim Murray presents an Australianist perspective; KelleyHays and Miriam Stark are graduate students working in theAmerican Southwest and the Philippines, respectively). Wealso wanted a philosopher's analysis of changing trends inarchaeology and were pleased that Alison Wylie acceptedour invitation. Wylie's paper, furthermore, is grounded in afeminist perspective on archaeological theory, which weregarded as an important component in modern archaeo-logical discourse.


14/150

Introduction: the sources of archaeological theory 3

Philip Kohl and Christopher Chippindale write about thesociological context of archaeological schools of theory.Kohl notes the similarities of processual and post-processualmovements, while Chippindale considers the questions ofsocial status and political correctness that attend claims oftheoretical purity. Both writers note that such claims, whichusually are directed against the defects of a foregoing schooland especially its lack of critical perspective on why and howit is historically situated, are notoriously un-self-critical intheir own pretensions.

Miriam Stark and Kelley Hays take up two of the mostimportant topics in modern archaeological practice, therelationship between studies of modern material culture inethnographic field situations and the ancient distribution ofartifacts, and the interpretation of prehistoric visual arts.Both consider the problem of elucidating cross-culturalregularities while insisting on context-specific culturalparticularities, and both offer practical avenues of analysisin ethnoarchaeological and symbolic studies. Tim Murrayconsiders, by means of examples from Australian prehistoryand modern political affairs in Australia, how diverseinterest groups compete both for ownership of the physicalpast and for control of the means by w hich the past might beinvestigated. In the presented case studies Murray shows thatby fostering communication and by re-examining how andfor whom the past is investigated and disseminated, thepossibility of avoiding a footrace for the high moral groundcan be facilitated. Finally, Richard Bradley offers anepilogue in which the process of archaeological discovery isconnected to theory-building in such a way that theory is notonly not distant from the archaeological record, but is ratherthe vehicle for open-mindedness and the exercise of criticalimagination.

The post-processual critiqueSince many new publications have evaluated the sources,trends, and diversity of post-processual theory (Binford1987, Earle and Preucel 1987, Gibbon 1989, Hodder, 1991,Patterson 1989, 1990, Preucel 1991, Redman 1991, Shanksand Tilley 1989, Stutt and Shennan 1990, Trigger 1989,1991, P. J. Watson, 1991, Watson and Fotiadis 1990,R. Watson 1990), we present here a critique - not all ofwhich is unfriendly - of post-processual claims simply asan introduction to our theme of agendas in archaeologicaltheory.

On the surface, little unanimity of what should be thesources of archaeological theory characterized the 1980s, ascan be seen from the following statements about the natureof archaeological theory that have been drawn from majoressays from that time:

(1) What archaeologists need is an evolutionary theory, a"theory that can be borrowed in unadulterated form,"namely modern biological theory, because "biology is... struggling with similar problems in a similar context"as archaeology (Dunne ll 1982: 20, 19).(2) "I don't believe there's any such thing as 'archaeo-logical theory.' For me there's only anthropologicaltheory. Archaeologists have their own methodology andethnologists have theirs; but when it comes to theory, weall ought to sound like anthropologists" (The Old Timer,cited in Flannery 1982: 269-70; this position is refutedby Flannery in Flannery and Marcus 1983: 361-2).(3) "If archaeologists can gain a healthy skepticismregarding received conceptualizations of nature and seekto place themselves in positions relative to nature andexperience where the adequacy and/or ambiguity of thereceived comm ents may be evaluated, then they can hopeto gain some objectivity relative to the utility of theirconcepts." Such objectivity will proceed, the authorscontinue from an unusual vantage point: "Once archae-ologists learn to look at systems from the realisticperspective of an observer in a well, they will see manynew things which can aid in the organizational diagnosesof past systems" (Binford and Sabloff 1982: 150, 151).(4) Archaeology is a mediated relation between whathappened and its representation . . . Material culture [is]a constructed network of significations . . . irreduciblypolysemous . . . a contextualized matrix of associativeand syntagmatic relations involving parallelism, oppo-sition, linearity, equivalence, and inversion between itselements (Shanks and Tilley 1987b: 134, 114, 115, 103).

Although there may seem to be little in common amongthe biological, anthropological, objectivist-positivist, andgenerative linguistic goals for archaeological theory-building, there is one unifying thread running through thedisparate views cited above (save perhaps the Binford-Sabloff damp allegiance to objectivism): archaeologicaltheory is a mining-and-bridging exercise. The archae-ologist's task is to find theory in some other discipline -since real theory exists in biology, geography, sociology,sociocultural anthropology, and/or linguistics - and then to"operationalize" that theory, that is, modify it for archaeo-logical purposes.

In the most atavistically positivist accounts of Binford andSchiffer, the mines need only be shallow while the bridgesare mighty. Binford's call for "good instruments formeasuring specified properties of past cultural systems"(Binford 1982: 129) and Schiffer's focus on site-formationprocesses that emphasize taphonomy, ethnoarchaeology,


15/150


and experimental archaeology (Schiffer 1987), are built onassumptions that once it is known how the archaeologicalrecord is formed, there will be a more-or-less clear path tothe behavior of the people who ultimately produced it.Unfortunately, the "good instruments" are still being forgedand the site-formation p rocesses still seem to be in formativestages of development. Grand organizational theory isusually eschewed until pur observational powers aresufficiently sharpened (see Schiffer 1988).

For most archaeologists, however, the mining part of theexercise is straightforward and depends on the backgroundof the "theoretician." Thus, catastrophe theory, central placetheory, structuralist theory, and others have been borrowedand adapted by "archaeological" theorists. The result ofthese mining-and-bridging operations has been to forceotherwise practically engaged archaeologists to consider theideas of Thorn, Christaller, Levi-Strauss, and others beforedetermining that mathematical topology, the economics ofretailing, and mythological analysis, however worthy ontheir own terms, are of limited or at best indirect relevanceto the study of past societies. By this time, of course, theminers have moved on and new bridges have been erected.Processual archaeology in the post-processual critiqueIt is in this context of theoretical eng ineering that the claimsof post-processual archaeology may be briefly evaluated.Since this discussion is not intended to duplicate or comm entupon the above-cited articles that review the contributions ofpost-processual archaeology, we shall pass over whateverschisms may be apparent among the hardly unified congre-gation of post-processual archaeologists. We apologize tooffended Albigensians and Monophysites for unfairlylumping them into what we delineate as the central post-processual creed.

The post-processual critique of the processual school canbe divided into three parts: the processual models of culture,material culture, and explanation. Processual archa eologists,according to the post-processualists, argue that culture is ameans of adaptation to the natural environment. Humanbehavior, being the instrument of such adaptation, is deter-mined by material circumstance s, while ideas and values areepiphenomenal and predictable by the m aterial conditions ofexistence. The systemic nature of human organization is dueto the functional relationship between material culture andthe environment such that an equilibrium is established andmaintained until upset by an external stress. Individualbehavior is determined by these systemic forces. Since therelationship between artifact characteristics and distributionsis functional and universal, the rema ins of past behavior canbe measured without reference to specific contexts.

Processualists (again, according to post-processualists)

consider that material culture is the passive product ofhuman adaptation to the external environment. Culture maytherefore be inferred from material culture after formationprocesses are taken into account. Once functional relation-ships within the system, and between the system and theexternal environment, are established, change can beexplained as perturbations that lead to greater adaptiveefficiency. Although material culture may serve ideologicalor social purposes, beliefs, ideas, and values are notreconstructable by archaeologists and, in any case, are ofsecondary importance in the function of material culture.

Explanation for processual archaeologists (in the post-processual view) consists in constructing universal lawsthrough the hypothetico-deductive method. Objectiveprocedures of analysis allow formulation and testing ofhypotheses that can be statistically confirmed or at leastfalsified. Detailed methodological work and cross-culturalcomparisons will result in law-like correlations betweenartifact distributions and social organizations. The con-structed typologies will stand in evolutionary sequencebased on their levels of adaptive efficiency.

This picture of what the post-processual archaeologistsclaim to be "processual archaeology" is, of course, a jarringcollage. While it may be intellectually amusing to fitSchiffer and Binford into the same frame, it is onlyunlettered arrogance that forces Flannery into the samefamily unit. What post-processual archaeologists haveconjoined as "processual archaeology" are certain pro-grammatic statements made about a quarter of a century ago(while ignoring the historical context of those positions). Notonly have post-processualists denied the diversity of viewsof archaeologists studying non-complex societies, but theyhave overlooked the fact that most archaeologists investi-gating ancient states and civilizations (since most post-processualists are not themselves interested in complexsocieties) were never processual archaeologists. Further-more, there is nothing new in the attack on functionalism andthe quest for cultural laws. Boasians of more than ahalf-century ago considered themselves to have refutedevolutionists and structural-functionalists on precisely theseterms.

The post-processual attack on scientism in processualarchaeology has, at least, made explicit that which mostarchaeologists have been content to accept without muchcomment. Those few archaeologists who insist on dis-covering "laws" have thus far failed to produce more thanthe most trivial of observations (as Flannery noted in 1973).Despite the most earnest claim that the development of morescientific methods of coping with the archaeological recordis only a first step, many studies of the physical propertiesof archaeological materials seem to be conducted in


16/150

Introduction: the sources of archaeological theory

the absence of any archaeological problem requiringinvestigation.

In the failure to discover "laws of behavior," there is ofcourse little agreement on what constitutes adequatearchaeological e xplanation - as the diversity of views onarchaeological theory cited above illustrates. However, intheir attack on scientism in archaeology, post-processualistshave unfairly de-empha sized the necessary role for scientificanalysis of archaeological materials in the investigation ofthe past; they have merely constructed a processual schoolin order to differentiate it from their own view of culture,material culture, and explanation.Culture, material culture, and explanation in post-processual archaeologyAccording to post-processualists, human behavior is"culturally constituted"; that is, behavior is informed bymeaning and through the agency of individuals. The ever-changing structure of meaning is context-dependent andnegotiated through the actions of individuals to produceculture. Culture, therefore, can only be understood as anideational code and must include function and meaning,process and structure, norms and variability, and subject andobject.

Material culture cannot be reduced as a direct reflectionof behavior because it is a transformation of behavior. Infact, material culture has transformative power; it is"recursive," and "acts back" on behavior as part of thestrategies of social negotiation. Material culture therebysymbolizes the relationship between people and things: asHodder puts it in an oft-cited passage, material culture andculture "are not caused by anything outside themselves . . .they just are" (1986: 4). Material culture, since it is used forpurposes of communication and to effect changes in thesocial environment, constitutes a universal meta-languageand hence m ust be read as a text. By contextualizing artifactsin the totality of the entire environm ent of cultural m eaningsand strategies, the symbolic message s of material culture canbe deciphered.

Explanation in post-processual archaeology is the processof deciphering the meaning-laden constitution of materialculture. As ethnoarchaeological researches have shown,adequate explanation of the parts of a cultural systemdepends on the richness of contextualization within specific,long-term historical trajectories. In order to reach themeaning of past social action, it is necessary, followingCollingwood, to live the past experience through the mind.As Hodder puts it, in another of his elegant locutions, "it isonly when we make assumptions about the subjectivemeanings in the minds of people long dead that we can beginto do archaeology" (1986: 7). Furthermore, since the real

world is not independent of the observer, archaeologistsmust understand how particular reconstructions of the pastare used in the context of modern society and the observer'splace in it. The achievement of self-knowledge is importantbecause "the need for cultural order is universal and themethods of producing and reading the cultural order arethe same in the present and the past" (Hodder 1986: 8).

From post-processual critique to archaeological theoryMuch of the post-processualist view of culture is obviouslyborrowed from post-modernist trends in literature and theresonance of such trends in sociocultural anthropology.For example, since, according to Clifford, "culture [is]composed of seriously contested codes and representations"(1986: 2), ethnographies are hardly empirical accounts butrather a species of fiction. In similar spirit, Hodder's"writing archaeology" (1989a, 1989b) and Tilley's call forsite-reports to be like stage plays (1989) are like "thickdescription," self-reflexivity, "dialogic" rhetoric and the"writer's voice" in post-modernist anthropology. Althoughpost-processualists are kindly dedicated to bringing variouspost-modernist writers into the purview of their less up-to-date archaeological brethren and sistren (see most recentlyTilley, ed. 1990, and Bapty and Yates, eds. 1990, who arecarrying on this mission), post-processual archaeologists aremuch like other archaeologists who borrow concepts ofculture, material culture, and explanation from a variety ofnon-archaeological sources and with little recourse to theunderstanding of archaeological problems. In this activitythey have functioned as theory-miners on a grander scalethan other archaeologists. Perhaps it is the very scale oftheir mining exercise that has prevented even the mostrudimentary of bridge-building operations. While Tilley'sassertion that "digging is a pathology of archaeology" (1989:275) has awakened the suspicion that some post-processualists are n't interested in the practice of archaeologyat all (as a practical science that studies the past; see Bradley,this volume), Hodder has clearly sought to distance himselffrom this position (19 91).

As many commentators have observed (see Kohl, thisvolume), most of the theoretical pronouncements of post-processual archaeologists began as structural oppositions totheir constructed category of "processualists." But, as weargue here, although functionalist, adaptationist, positivist,and reductionist ideas of culture and material culture can bedredged up from some fossilized "new archaeo logists," theseviews have never been held seriously by many (includingleading) archaeologists. (Is or was Gordon Willey or RobertMcC. Adams a "new archaeologist"?)

Yet the dichotomy of views between, for example,


17/150


Binford and Hodder, the academic patrons of new andpost-processual archaeology, respectively, is of continuinginterest to historians and philosophers of archaeology. First,Binford seems not to have grasped that if a model of cultureis preferred to his own adaptationist one, then a differentinterpretation of material culture and explanation iswarranted (Binford 1987, Binford and Stone 1988). Post-processual archaeologists, on the other hand, have resistedclaims that there is anything important that is adaptive orfunctional in culture and material culture or that there aresound and successful empirical methods for dealing withresidues of the past.

Preucel has recently sought to reconcile these opposingviews (1991). He proposes that archaeologists must includescientific, empirical methods in explaining human behaviorwhile also seeking to understand (sensu Dilthey's verstehen)the past so that "an empathetic linkage between the past andthe present is established" and w e may identify "the m eaningof cultural systems for those participants within it" (Preucel1991: Ch. 1). The practice of analysis must finally considera self-understanding of why archaeologists ask certainquestions and what is the "intellectual investment in aparticular answer" (Preucel 1991: Ch. 1). Although Preucelaccepts the terms of the debate as set by those working atits extremes, he still regards the various approaches in pro-cessual and post-processual archaeology as complementaryand mutually reinforcing.

While Preucel's attempt at resolving these theoreticaloppositions is admirable, one may question his synthesis ontwo grounds. First, not all working archaeologists are card-carrying members of one of the two schools that aredelineated; also, the two diametrically opposed views ofculture, material culture, and explanation cannot easily becompartmentalized into different aspects of, or as sub-sequent steps in, archaeological practice. Second, it seemsdisingenuous to claim that archaeological theory can beabstracted from the kinds of problems that archaeologistsseek to investigate and that archaeological theory is a kindof abstract logic. These two points deserve someelaboration.

It is a relief to many archaeologists that they can do with-out either a nomothetic view of culture or one that holds thatmaterial culture is a text and site reports are a kind of story.Indeed, for most archaeologists it is obvious that the degreeto which culture/material culture can be considered as aresponse to the environm ent is greater in the Paleolithic thanin classical Athens. Similarly, in ancient states one muststudy a variety of social and economic orientations,especially the nature of political systems and resistance tothem; in non-stratified societies one studies, among otherthings, wealth-levelling mechanisms, the moral economy of

kinship relations, and how these institutions are sociallylearned and reproduced. Since the nature of culture is verydifferent along the spectrum of human societies, it followsthat archaeological theory must vary commensurately withthe societies and problems being investigated.

We must also point out in this otherwise high-mindeddiscussion of the nature of archaeological theory thatchronological resolution in archaeology is often coa rse, thatsite-formation proce sses are critically important in a ssessingartifactual patterning, that population size is often a guessinggame and, even if we could identify individuals in prehis-tory, one would then need to relate individual behavior tothat of the group (or groups) in which the individual wasembedded (see Shennan, this volume). Furthermore, as Kohland Wylie discuss in this volume, if archaeologists are tothink themselves into the past and regard the process ofinference as a species of story-telling, we shall not only loseacademic credibility as scientists, but also we shall bore thepublic who can always find more entertaining versions ofthe past than archaeologists are likely to produce. Althougharchaeologists can have no objective way of reconstructing afinal and uniquely true human past, they do have the capab ilityof eliminating some alternative versions, and reasonablyprefer others (as Wylie shows in her paper in this volume).

While the methodological objections alone may besufficient to put most archaeologists off post-processualism,it is still important to evaluate post-processual claims ofwhat culture is, and hence how material culture is to bestudied and explanation structured. Having rejected theadaptationist and functionalist views of the "new archae-ologists," is the post-processual position the only viablealternative?

David Clarke w rote (in the R. Chapman translation) of hisown concern about the relationship of culture to materialculture in a way that still commands our attention:

The anthropologists [may] look at aspects of the socialsystem of cultures [whilst] the archae ologists . . . look atthe material system of the same cultures - the systems arenot the same yet neither are they unconnected. Seriousdangers await those who transfer observations about theone class of system to the other and yet it is important thatthe coupling between the different systems and theirattributes should be . . . made explic it. . . The archaeo-logical entities reflect realities [that are] as important asthose recognized by . . . other disciplines . . . [and] areequally re a l .. . and simply different (1978: 61, 369).

We may infer from Clarke that even if the post-processualview of culture as a network of individuals negotiating theirstatus is not fallacious, it is a partial view of the range,origins, and changing nature of culture and need not deter-


18/150

Introduction: the sources of archaeologica l theory 7

mine the archaeological investigation of material culture.Archaeologists deal with certain kinds of problems, some ofwhich are not studied or cannot be studied by socioculturalanthropologists. Archaeological theory, it follows, cannotsimply be a subset of anthropological theory (see Flannery1983, and Wobst 1978).

Understanding the transition to sedentary, food-producingsocieties or explaining how certain groups control access toscarce resources, including the field of symbolic resources(see Hays, this volume) in the evolution of ancient states andcivilizations, or how and why movements of peoplesresulted in culture change, cannot be reduced to theoriesabout the negotiation of meaning.

In sum, no matter how salient in post-modern ethno-graphic theory the role of the individual might be, there islittle theory on the in dividua l's ability to affect m ore than theshort-term ethnographic moment. Thus the issue at stake intheory-building in archaeology concerns what is the propersubject of archaeological research and what is the relation-ship between culture history and cultural generalization (seeStark, this volume).Archaeo logical se lf-criticism and the future ofarchaeological theoryThe most powerful rhetoric of post-processual archae-ologists has focused on the relationship of the archaeologicalinvestigator to the number of important political issues thatdo and mu st obtain in every stage in the reconstruction of thepast. The post-processualist position has been (especially inthe writings of Shank s and Tilley, e.g., 1987a, 1987b, Tilley1989) that processual (and all other non-post-processual)archaeologists, under the guise of being neutral and scien-tific reporters of the past, have been in fact willingconspirators in exercising a control over the past in theinterests of the conservative, ruling apparatus of modernWestern societies.

Post-processualists have argued, by way of example, thatprinciples of systemic order and economic rationality aresimply Western concepts that apply to capitalist societiesand have been writ (wrongly) by processualists as universalprinciples of analysis. Similarly, the goal of constructinguniversal "laws" of behavior has tended to rob indigenous,subject peoples of their own pasts: their histories and theirviews of their histories are insignificant compared to thescientific enterprises carried out by objective archaeologists.While great museums have nobly argued that they safe-guard the remnants of past human achievement, post-processualists charge that the museums are really claimingthat they are the spiritual heirs of the past; the objections toforeign ownership by institutions in lands whence theartifacts originated are petty and wearisome. Furthermore,

the presence of these foreign artifacts happily reminds theWestern museums' clients of the former or current powerof their own lands and of the generosity of benevolentphilanthropists who were able to secure the prized residuesof the past.

While these powerful and often cogent arguments are notand have not been the sole property of post-processualistarchaeologists, the force of post-processual arguments hasfocused the attention of the archaeological community and isespecially not lost on modern students of archaeology.Archaeologists of all theoretical persuasions, however, areworking to reorganize governmental policies concerningreburial, repatriation, sacred sites, and excavation pro-cedures. Jim Allen (1987) has shown that archaeologycannot be and never was an ivory-tower discipline; TimMurray, in this volume, has presented an example of howarchaeological theory is implicated in the practice ofarchaeology in Australia.As Murray's, Wylie's, and Kohl's essays in this volumeemphasize, moreover, the branch of post-processualism thatargues that there are multiple versions of the past and that allor many of them might be equally valid (especially as isespoused by Shanks and Tilley) contradicts the importantcall to political action by archaeologists. Just as they haverefuted claims of the Third Reich and some South Africanand Israeli governments, for example, archaeologists todaycannot afford multiple versions of the past to proliferate.Rather, it is critical that archaeologists assert that there is atleast a partially knowable antiquity and that archaeologistsare the guardians of its integrity.

ConclusionIn this introduction we have argued that post-processualarchaeologists, like their equally theory-borrowing adver-saries, have looked to other fields' theories to understandthe archaeological record. However, while most theory-borrowers have ingeniously attempted to show that theirtheory explains observed patterns of data, post-processualarchaeologists have advanced a theory that is unlinked andapparently unlinkable to archaeological practice (O'Shea's1992 review of Hodder 1990; compare Hodder [1991],who insists that outdoors is where he wants to be). Post-processual theory in archaeology has been takensubstantially from post-modernist trends in social theorywhich, however weakly transmuted into archaeologicalterms, are less concerned with specific cases and concreteproblems than w ith a self-denigrating polyvocality. Practicaland substantive arguments are not held to carry conviction -this despite a century of progress in archaeologicalknowledge that ought to have made archaeology an


19/150


ornament of modern academic life as it is a subject ofendless public fascination.Of all the social sciences (in which category we include

the historical sciences), archaeology stands alone in itsfailure to insist on and build a contextually appropriate rangeof social theory. Such theories must afford linkage betweenmatters of data collection and primary analysis of data, andthe process of inference in which patterns of data are held toreflect social phenomena. Thus far the process of inferencehas relied on assumptions and analogies - theories or parts oftheories - that have been drawn from other disciplines.These theories have been used to model extant archaeo-logical data by specifying the logically entailed, but non-existent, data required by the overarching assumptions andanalogies. Having borrowed these "prior probabilities"(Salmon 1982) from other fields, archaeologists havecondemned the past to resemble some aspect of thepresent.It is only when archaeologists are able to build socialtheory on an intra-archaeological data base and using anintra-archaeological comparative method - one thatdemands the possibility of discovering and explainingcontrasts as well as similarities - that archaeological theorycan be said to flourish. Using this foundation of archaeo-logical theory, then, we will be able to select critically and toevaluate theories that might be taken over from other fieldsand that are claimed to fit past organizational structures andtrajectories of change . This volum e is dedicated to the idealof constructing a range of archaeological theory that isappropriate to the problems arch aeologists face.

Post-processual archaeologists have effectively empha-sized that archaeology is an interpretive science, thatsymbols, ideologies and structures of meaning are notmerely reflections of how hu mans c ope with the vagaries ofexternal environments. Furthermore, as post-processualistshave stressed, archaeologists have special responsibilities,not only in recovering the past, but also in ensuring that thepast is not maliciously used in the present. Post-processualarchaeologists, however, have no monopoly on thesematters. Indeed, the post-processual school is no school at all(nor have its proponents ever declared that it was) in that itdoes not attempt to formulate a constructive archaeologicalagenda, launches no coherent body of theory and method forinterpreting the past, and sets out deliberately to obfuscatethe genuine gains made in over a century of systematicarchaeological researc h.

The ideological danger posed by the grimmest processualscientism pales in com parison to the threat of those w ho seekto undermine the framework of traditional archaeologicalpractice and who, at their most systematically critical, areindeed nihilists. In this time when the existence of archae-

ology in the academy is being debated and the integrity ofarchaeologists is being questioned in public forums, archae-ologists cannot be excused the responsibility for setting ourown theoretical and contextually appropriate agenda.

AcknowledgmentsParts of this introduction were initially written by NormanYoffee during a seminar on "Post-processual archaeology"which he supervised at the University of Arizona duringthe Fall semester, 1988. The paper Yoffee presented at theTAG meeting (entitled "Archaeological theory: somethingborrowed, something blue") had as co-authors the membersof that seminar: John Carpenter, Astrid Golomb, TimothyJones, Kelley Hays, Maria O'Donovan, Louise Senior,Miriam Stark, Mary Van Buren, Ruth Van Dyke, and MariaNieves Zede no. We both thank these co-authors for allowingus to incorporate sections from our joint paper in thisintroduction. We are also grateful to Alison Wylie, HughGusterson, and Joyce Marcus for their good advice on thisintroduction.

ReferencesAllen, Jim 1987 The Politics of Archaeology. InauguralAddress of the Professor, Dept. of Archaeology, La

Trobe University, Bundoora, Victoria, Australia.Bapty, Ian and Tim Yates, eds. 1990 Archaeology after

Structuralism: Post-Structuralism and the Practice ofArchaeology. Andover: Routledge.

Binford, Lewis 1982 Objectivity-Explanation-Archaeology1981. In Theory and Explanation in Archaeology,edited by C. Renfrew, M. Rowlands, and B. A.Segraves, pp. 125-38. Academic Press: New York.1987 Data, Relativism and Archaeological Science. Man22 : 391-^04.

Binford, Lewis and Jeremy Sabloff 1982 Paradigms, Sys-tematics, and Archaeology. Journal of AnthropologicalResearch 38: 137-53.

Binford, Lewis and Nancy Stone 1988 Archaeology andTheory. Man 23 : 374-6.Clarke, David 1978 Analytical Archaeology, 2nd revised

edn. by Robert Chapman. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press.Clifford, Jam es 1986 Introduction: Partial Truths. In Writing

Cultures, edited by James Clifford and George Marc us,pp . 1-26. A School of American Research AdvancedSeminar book. Berkeley: University of C aliforniaPress.

Dunne ll, Robert 1982 Science, Social Science, and CommonSense: The Agonizing Dilemma of Modern Archae-ology. Journal of Anthropological Research 38: 1-25.


20/150

Introduction: the sources of archaeological theory

Earle, Timothy and Robert Preucel 1987 Processual Archae-ology and the Radical Critique. Current Anthropology28 : 501-38.

Flannery, Kent 1973 Archaeology with a Capital S. InResearch and Theory in Current Archaeology, editedby Charles Redman, pp. 47-52 . New York: John Wileyand Sons.

1982 T he Golden Marshalltown: A Parable for theArchaeology of the 1980s. American Anthropologist84 : 265-78.

1983 Archaeology and Ethnology in the Context ofDivergent Evolution. In The Cloud People, edited byKent Flannery and Joyce Marcus, pp. 361-2. NewYork: Academic Press.

Gibbon, Guy 1989 Explanation in Archaeology. Oxford:Basil Blackwell.

Hodder, Ian 1986 Reading the Past. Cambridge: C ambridgeUniversity Press.1989a Writing Archaeology: Site Reports in Context.Antiquity 63 : 268-74.

1989b This is Not an Article about Material Culture asText. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 8:250-69.

1990 The Domestication of Europe. Oxford: BasilBlackwell.

1991 Interpretive Archaeology and its Role. AmericanAntiquity 56: 7-18.

Kintigh, Keith and Lynne Goldstein 1990 Ethics and theReburial Controversy. American Antiquity 55 : 585-91.

O'Shea, John Review of Ian Hodder, The Dom estication ofEurope. In American Anthropologist (forthcoming).Patterson, Tom 1989 History and the Post-ProcessualArchaeologies. Man 24: 555-66.

1990 Some Theoretical Tensions within and between theProcessual and Postprocessual Archaeologies. Journalof Anthropological Archaeology 9: 189-200.

Preucel, Robert 1991 Introduction. In Processual and Post-processual Archaeologies: Multiple Ways of K nowingthe Past, edited by Robert Preucel, pp. 1-14.Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

Redman, Charles 1991 In Defense of the Seventies - TheAdolescence of New Archaeology. American Anthro-pologist 93 : 295-307.

Salmon, Merilee 1982 Philosophy and Archaeology. NewYork: Academic Press.Schiffer, Michael 1987 Formation Processes of the

Archaeological Record. Albuquerqu e: University ofNew M exico Press.1988 The Structure of Archaeological Theory. AmericanAntiquity 53 : 461-85.

Shanks, Michael and Christopher Tilley 1987a Re -Constructing Archaeology. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press.

1987b Social Theory and Archaeology. Oxford: BasilBlackwell.1989 Archaeology into the 90s. Norwegian Archaeo-

logical Review 21: 1-54 (with comments by Hodder,Olsen, Herschend, Nordbladh, Trigger, Wenke,Renfrew, and authors' response).

Stutt, Arthur and Stephen Shennan 1990 The Nature ofArchaeological Argument. Antiquity 64 245): 766-77.Tilley, Christopher 1989 Excavation as Theatre. Antiquity63 : 275-80.

1990 Reading Material Culture, edited by ChristopherTilley. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Trigger, Bruce 1989 A History of Archaeological Thought.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.1991 Co nstraint and Freedom: A New Synthesis forArchaeological Interpretation. American Anthro-

pologist 93 : 551-69.Watson, Patty Jo 1991 A Parochial Primer: The NewDissonance as Seen from the Midcontinental U.S.A.

In Processual and Postprocessual Archaeologies:Multiple Ways of Knowing the Past, edited by RobertPreucel, pp. 265-74. Carbondale: Southern IllinoisUniversity Press.

Watson, Patty Jo and Michaelis Fotiadis 1990 The Razor'sEdge: Symbolic-Structural Archaeology and theExpansion of Archaeological Inference. AmericanAnthropologist 92 : 613-29.

Watson, Richard 1990 Ozymandias, King of Kings: Post-processual Radical Archaeology as Critique. AmericanAntiquity 55: 673-89.

Wobst, Martin 1978 The Archaeo-Ethnology of Hunter-Gatherers or the Tyranny of the Ethnographic R ecord inArchaeology. American Antiquity 43: 303-9.


21/150


22/150

PART I

The social context ofarchaeological theory


23/150


24/150

1Limits to a post-processualarchaeology (or, The dangersof a new scholasticism)1PHILIP L. KOHL

In search of the truly criticalPost-processual archaeology is an amorphous phenomenon;it assumes many different shapes and forms, derivinginspiration from fields as diverse as contemporary literarycriticism, women's studies, and human geography. As Earleand Preucel (1987) have recently suggested, post-processualarchaeology may, in fact, constitute more a radical critiqueof the long dominant, "new" Anglo-American archaeologyof the sixties and seventies than a unified research pro-gramm e or disciplinary paradigm in its own right simply dueto this diversity. It is such a mixed b ag that it is difficult todefine a common core, a new orthodoxy that has alreadyreplaced or, at least, is trying to dislodge the positivist,systemic ecological functionalism (or what I prefer to dub"animalism" - as opposed to the overused "vulgar" orthe misnamed "cultural materialism"), championed moststridently by L. Binford and his disciples.

Yet if the adjective new had the most positive conno-tations in American culture and American archaeo logy in thelate sixties, defining a rebellion against all that was old,traditional, and therefore suspect, the adjective critical todayseems to be accorded the highest status, possibly uniting thediverse strands of post-processual archaeology into a singlecritically self-conscious, reflexive enterprise. Whether wehave read our Adorno, Horkheimer, M arcuse, and Habermasor have not mulled over the profundities of the FrankfurtSchool in our search for a meaningful - dare I use thesixties word? - relevant archaeology, we post-processualistsby definition are involved in a critical process of self-examination, engaged introspection, reflective inquiry onthe multiple meanings of the past for the present, the presentfor the past, and all possible permutations thereof. If the

hypothetical deductive scientists of the "new" archaeo-logical paradigm saw themselves as the ultimate socialplanners, discovering laws of cultural evolution that wouldlead us knowingly into the 21st century, we post-processualists have more modest aims. We can predictneither the past, nor the future; in fact, we claim not really toknow the past at all. Rather, we tell stories about it anddiscover stories told by previous generations of scholars,including, of course, those constructed by the Binfordianmad-scientists and their ilk. But - and this is the imp ortantpoint - we proceed critically, seeing how these stories areused and manipulated for present purposes, sometimescondemning the tale, sometimes approving it - always, ofcourse, from a critical perspective.

We are also constantly critically examining the socialsetting in which knowledge is produced, the disciplinaryacademic context or class background of particular scholarsor schools to which they belong. Knowledge is neverabsolute, nor certain, but must be contextualized, related to aparticular time and place. Thus, Shanks and Tilley haveexhorted us in their breathlessly inspired, albeit "provisional,frail, and flawed" personal encounter with the past and itspresent that "any adequate conceptual and theoretical frame-work developed in studying the past must incorporatereflection upon archaeology as a professional discipline inthe present" (Shanks and Tilley 1987: 2-3). In a criticallyself-conscious spirit, this chapter will attempt to follow thesewords of wise advice and reflect upon the current state ofAnglo-American archaeology, for - it must be emphasized- in post-processual archaeology we are dealing with aphenomenon largely limited to the British Isles and NorthAmerica; it is a curious fact (which also must be criticallyexamined) that archaeology as practiced in most areas of theworld has yet to experience its processual phase, much lessbenefit from its post-processualist critique.

Post-processual archaeology: the good, the bad, and thedangerousOur cynicism must be tempered. Although this chapter iswritten from a perspective that is critical of po st-processualarchaeology (or at least some of its practitioners) and, in thatsense, concentrates on certain defects or limitations, we m ustfirst acknowledge some real accomplishments. First, a"radical critique" of processual archaeology was longoverdue and welcome. The debunking of the naive, "gollygee, Mr. Science" positivism characteristic of the worst ofthe new archaeology (e.g. Watson, Redman, and LeBlanc1971), as well as of the perhaps more insidious andubiquitous ecological materialism, characteristic of pro-cessual archaeology, had to occur, and, in retrospect, it is

13


25/150

14 Philip L. Kohl

not surprising that critiques appeared more or less simul-taneously on several theoretical fronts from Marxism to thestructural and symbolic/contextual approaches advancedparticularly by I. Hodder (1986).

There is no need to retread familiar ground; suffice it tosay that nearly a generation of young scholars grew up andsometimes were uncritically indoctrinated in the canons ofthe new archaeology. Rare are the scholars like Mark Leone,who were first schooled in the heady days of the establish-ment of the "new archaeology" or archaeological paradigm,who later perceived the error of their ways. Retreats to thesafety of middle-range theorizing or the none-too-subtleRed-baiting that characterizes Binford's defense (Binford1986: 402-3) of the movement he pioneered illustrate howobstinate most p ositivists are in the belief in objectivity andin a know able, external world. Mo re of this defense later, buthere from a truly critical perspective it is worth noting howingrained American belief in the omnipotence of scienceactually is; how easy it is in an American context fortechnique and rigorous methodology to masquerade astheory, a tendency that formed one of the dominant featuresof processual archaeology; finally and from an equallycritical, contextually sensitive perspective, it is striking thatthe most vigorous assault on positivism and a rejection of thedichotomy between idiographic and nomothetic or betweenhistorical and comparative evolutionary approaches hasemerged in England, a country whose experiences thiscentury, like those of all European countries, have beenconsiderably more complicated, nuanced, and fraught withreversals and declines than those of the United States.European p ositivism and belief in unlimited progress died onthe battlefields of World War I only to be resurrectedphoenix-like on the relatively unscarred terrain of the UnitedStates. Or, as B. Trigger (19 89: 19) correctly reminds us, therelatively low prestige accorded history in the United Statesis related to American history (our collective escape fromEurope) and the "present-mindedness" of American culture.

In Great Britain the distinctive internal disciplinarydevelopment of prehistory came as an extension of historywhile in the United States archaeology came to be con-sidered part of anthropology, which itself developed withininstitutions of natural history, like the Smithsonian andthe American Museum of Natural History. From such aperspective one can better understand why British archae-ologists today are sensibly turning to historians andphilosophers of history and are suggesting, like Hodder, thatarchaeology is a form of long-term history, a discipline withits own distinctive methods and techniques of analysis, butone whose task is essentially the same as history's: thereconstruction of the human past. Binford's continuinginsistence that "history as the model for archaeological

investigations is . . . totally inappropriate" (Binford 1986:401) simply does not understand the nature of historicalsources, particularly their inherent limitations and ambi-guities, nor the art of historical interpretation, and nothingthat I have read which he has written suggests that hisunderstanding of contemporary historiography has advance dbeyond the grossest, dated caricature of history as aparticularizing, idiographic discipline. Post-processualists,thankfully, have rejected this one-sided and now completelyoutmoded perspective on the discipline with which archae-ology forms a natural alliance, indeed extension: history.

The diversity of post-processual archaeology and itsadvocacy of m ultiple perspectives for perceiving the past is,generally speaking, a strength; it certainly is a welcomedevelopment compared to the orthodoxy or dogmaticfeatures of the new (or) processual archaeology. A Frencharchaeologist with whom I worked used to delight inparodying the structure of a typical article gracing the pagesof American Antiquity during the late sixties and theseventies: refutation of all previous explanations for problemX; development of an alternative, more satisfactory andinclusive hypothesis for explaining problem X; test andconfirmation of the proposed hypothesis often withoutnewly excavated evidence to support the theory but neverwithout rigorous statistical confirmation, always dem anding,as the seventies proceeded, access to a computer. Thereferences cited in these articles, as my French colleaguefondly noted, were always exclusively written in English.Hopefully, we have moved beyond such mechanicalallegiance to a formula, beyond such parochialism.Hopefully.How refreshing today to see a thousand alternativeapproaches to the past blooming! Since subjectivity and thebias of the observer can never be e liminated, let us not insistupon mathematical rigor for its own sake, but formimpressionistic, qualitative judgments; the intuitive, gutfeelings of traditional archaeologists often resulted in greatdiscoveries, and we should emulate them as much as theunimaginative scientific drones who succeeded them.

A feminist archaeology? Why not? There is no questionthat models of cultural evolution largely have had a malebias; attention to gen der distinctions in the prehistoric recordcannot help but yield a more representative and completeunderstanding of past societies. Many contemporary socialhistorians (e.g. Davis 1975-76), archaeology's naturaldisciplinary bedfellows, have successfully rewritten orreexamined past societies by focusing their research on thecontribution and role of women in the societies andhistorical periods of concern; clearly a similar emphasis inprehistory is overdue. There is no debate that gender shouldbe recognized as "a central category of human social life,"


26/150

Limits to a post-processual archaeology 15

that the past should be "engendered."2 Nor is there anyargument with the extremely salutary goal of correctingthe androcentric, often largely speculative reconstructionsthat constitute most attempts at piecing together the past.As sympathetic investigators have noted, the inherentlimitations of the archaeological record have not inhibitedarchaeologists from attempting to reconstruct intangiblefeatures of social organization or ideology. The avoidance ofengendering the past on epistemological grounds, thus,appears unfair and biased.

Or does it? Part of the critical reading of post-processualarchaeology advanced h ere relates ultimately to the nature ofthe archaeological record. Whether one writes of conceptualoppositions supposedly driving significant processes ofcultural evolution (e.g., the imagined domus/agrios dis-tinction for the domestication of Europe [Hodder 1990]) orengenders a very deficient record that is essentially silent onmale/female tasks and roles within a particular society orarchaeological culture (like the Upper Paleolithic Magda-lenian culture of southwestern Europe), the problem ofevidence cannot be ignored or swept aside simply byconjuring up one plausible, "peopled" reading of this record.Or, to use an older metaphor, sometimes the "Indians" arenot particularly visible behind the artifacts, and, w hen that isthe case, one should restrain or modify one 's poetic, fictionalimpulse to concoct a just-so story. As archaeologists, weshould not aspire to be Jean M . Auel. It is just an unfortunatefact that a purely prehistoric r ecord is all too frequently silenton this important problem of determining gend er differencesand contributions. The point is not to condemn beforehandimaginative efforts at teasing out gender distinctions in thearchaeological record; the data we collect and analyze andthe interpretations we impart to it clearly are conditioned byour theories and perspectives, by the questions we ask. It isjust that one should not gloss over the difficulties involved ininterrogating that often intractable material culture record.To insist that "gender attribution" is unimportant orinessential to the task of constructing a feminist archaeologyis to mislead. If one cannot determine whether some sociallyimportant group labor was performed by women or men or,more mundanely, whether this pot or this tool was made bya male o r a female, one should simply adm it it and ask otherquestions of these m aterials. Alternatively or even more, if agiven record lacks the information needed to engender thepast, the archaeologist interested in these questions shouldnot just spin a plausible engendered tale but should feelcompelled to gather to the best of her/his ability the data thatwould allow for such reconstructions. Binford probably wascorrect in his revisionist reading of Bordes' interpretationof the Middle Paleolithic, but, unfortunately, he neverbothered to "te st" his theory by collecting better information

through his own e xcavations. This is not a model one shouldemulate.The same epistemological difficulty must be addressed for

all the alternative readings of the past that we can envision.Since there were nearly as many important social divisionsin the past as there are in the present, we must be open to andexplore all sorts of possibilities. An homosexuals' archae-ology? A wo rkers' archaeology? An archaeology for andabout the elderly? Why not? Name a cause which any fair,liberal, open-minded folk would support, and we shouldbe able to devise a material culture reading of the pastaddressing its concerns. This is not an unhealthy develop-ment. An archaeology that focuses on questions of socialinequality is appropriate and exciting, as is the nascent andflourishing archaeological examination of plantationcomplexes and slavery in the American South and else-where.3 One nevertheless m ust keep analytically distinct theadmirable social cause from the archaeology and theevidence that the archaeological record may or may notcontain. Unfortunately, not all of these new approaches tothe past will be equally amenable to archaeological analysis,to the direct interpretation of the material culture record. Ifthe post-processualists triumph in their struggle against theold fogeys and reactionaries, entirely new departments ofarchaeology can be envisioned. No more job announcementsfor areal, period, or even theory specialists; rather, depart-ments will hire archaeologists trained to represent "differentinterest groups" (see Hodder 1986: 149). Such a develop-ment could bring healthy change in the hallowed halls ofacademe - if it leads to the rigorous and appropriate archae o-logical examination of these issues. If, on the other hand, itresults only in unconstrained multiple readings of the past,the discipline of prehistoric anthropological archaeologywill come to resemble a poor stepfellow's department offictional literature.

Diversity is a strength, but we cannot abandon tests ofadequacy or those approaches to the past which are moresatisfying, which may also mean more explanatory, thanothers. For accounts of specific problems, this may meanrecourse to environmental-, demographic-, or technological-based explanations. Not for every issue, not inevitably; butwhen the archaeological evidence is most satisfactorilyaccounted for through such an interpretation, w e should notbe afraid to make it simply because it smacks of the vulgarmaterialism long dominant in processual archaeology. Theproblem with the metaphor of story telling is not just thatlinks to an external real world are severed or, in some sense,trivialized, but also that the relativity of the exercise may beimplied: one yarn is as good as another. Here, diversitybecomes liability as any review of racist or chauvinist,nationalist readings of the past would demonstrate. The point


27/150

16 Philip L. Kohl

is obvious and should not require belaboring, but,apparently, many post-processualists in England and theUnited States operate unde r the illusion that such dangerous,undesirable tendencies are behind us and represent nothingmore than an unfortunate episode in the history of thediscipline. In the real world (e.g., Southeast Asia, China,the former Soviet Union, the Middle East, continentalEurope) such "readings" are still ubiquitous and stilldangerous: the material culture record all too frequently isused to justify nationalist aspirations and land claims. In thislight, post-processual archaeology seems absurdly aca-demic.

Diversity is a strength, but it may also result in an archae-ology that refuses to confront significant problems, toaddress unresolved difficulties in our understanding of thepast. When I am lectured to on the significance of dec oratedcalabashes among the Ilchamus of Baringo, Kenya orsubjected to an excruciatingly detailed analysis of contem-porary Sw edish and British beer cans - besides yawning andfalling asleep or turning to a really good story, i.e., a novel tobe read for pleasure, I note, as others have done before me,that the advocated contextual critical approach seems tooffer its most telling insights on the contemporary orethnographically and historically documented world. Thetranslation of these examples to the prehistoric past,however, and their relevance to what should be the majoractivity of most archa eologists, is either unclear or largely anarticle of faith.

Being critical, I also contemplate how trivial our sense ofproblem has become. The greatness of Childe consisted notonly in his consistent application of the most powerful andgenerally appropriate and amenable social theory forarchaeological purposes, Marxism, but also in his concernand focus in his major works on important prehistoricquestions ranging from the introduction and utilization ofwheeled vehicles to the spread of food-producing economiesup the Danube or the interrelations among the early riverinecivilizations of Mesopotam ia and the Nile and Indus valleys.What will consign some of the output of today's m ost visiblepost-processualists to early obscurity is their choice offundamentally irrelevant, at times even ludicrous, subjectsfor analysis. Phrasing this even more critically, it seems tome that the intellectual game-playing quotient (or sophistry)of post-processual archaeology, at this stage at any rate, iseven higher than that which characterized the early writingsof the first generation of new archaeologists. Whetherquestioning the food-sharing proclivities of our Plio-Pleistocene ance stors or sniffing around F. Bordes, drinkinghis wine, and jousting w ith him over the interpretation of theMousterian, Binford, at least initially, addressed majorproblems in prehistory.

Binford is also correct in insisting that there is an externalworld out there, a reality, which the archaeological record -however palely and imperfectly - reflects. His currentemphasis on the problems of interpreting that record, thedistinction between contemporary artifacts and the pastactivities that produced them, middle-range theorizing, andthe like - all these mark a significantly m ore sober app raisalof archaeology's ability to reconstruct the past than theunrestrained optimistic evaluation of his and other newarchaeologists' writings of the late sixties and earlyseventies. These trends have not - quite explicitly andforcefully not - succumbed to the ultimate relativist orsubjectivist tem ptation: that reality is a chimera or, at least,unknowable, and that one interpretation of the present orpast is as valid as any other. Some of the more unguarded,hyperbolic statements of his post-processual nemesis,Hodder, unfortunately have implied that this Pandora's boxshould be opened, resulting inevitably, of course, in therealization that Mr. von Daniken 's readings of prehistory areas true and meaningful as those of Mr. Hodder.

Overstated, malicious? Perhaps, but m y criticism isintended to polemicize and ruffle certain feathers. Oneother significant limitation of Hodder's prescriptions forreading the past should be noted: his vaunted idealism.Methodological and theoretical difficulties beset therealization of this goal. I have written about the latter before(Kohl 1985), and, from my perspective, Hodder's morerecent writings only confirm m y suspicions that, if we followhis advice, we enter a world of cultural mystification, orwhat R. Fox labels "culturology," a world in which peoplesdiffer simply because they differ, their cultures irreduciblePlatonic essences, givens that somehow exist outside thestream of historical experience. Let me cite Hodderhimself:

But to claim that culture is meaningfully constituted isultimately to claim that aspects of culture are irreducible... The cultural relationships are not caused by anythingelse outside themselves. They just are.

Moreover,If we say that meanings are context dependent, then allwe can do is come to an understanding of each culturalcontext in its own right, as a unique set of cultural dis-positions and practices. We cannot generalize from oneculture to another. (Hodder 1986: 4, 6)

Additional comment might not be necessary. Here I havenot parodied Hodder but quoted him directly. This view notonly will not take us very far in unde rstanding the past, but,I would argue, is simply wrong and mystifying, treatingculture as something not produced and constantly made,


28/150

Limits to a post-processual archaeology 17

remade, and sometimes even consciously invented, byhuman groups in specific historical situations for specific,partially ascertainable reasons. Archaeologists shouldconsider meaningfully constituted cultural explanations forcertain phenomena, including long-term regularities oftentraceable in the archaeological record; but our task onlybegins, not ends, with the identification of specific culturalpatterns (see Wolf 1984).

Methodological objections also are apparent to this callfor getting "inside" the real meaning of archaeological data.Philosophically, R. G. Collingwood may make a moreattractive guru for understanding the human past thanC. Hempel, but the strictures Collingwood advocates areoften too difficult for historians to apply, much less archae-ologists who always must interpret mute, meaningfullyambiguous artifacts. This difficulty has been well stated byA. Gilman:

The problem is that past ideas are represented as suchthrough symbols, which are by definition arbitrary withrespect to their referents . . . For prehistory, where nosuch bilinguals (as in ethno- or historical archaeology)exist, how are the symbols in the archaeological text to beread? (Gilman 1987: 516)

The point is not that cultural mean ings, ideas, and values areunimportant or can be treated satisfactorily as epiphenom enato more basic ma terial conditions. I also suppose it is usefulfor us to be reminded of M. Weber's famous (if contested)hypothesis on the significance of the P rotestant ethic for theemergence of capitalism and to be told how unsatisfactorilyarchaeologists, including (perhaps even especially)Marxists, treat things ideological. All this is fair eno ugh, butit does not solve the problem of interpreting meaningfullyambiguous material culture remains - except, of course,through various sleights of hand, subtle introductions ofhistorical or ethnographic examples posing as prehistoric.We are once more confronting a world of relativism wheremy interpretation of meaning is as valid as you rs.

Astoundingly enough, the optimism of some post-processual archaeologists even exceeds that of the early newarchaeologists. It is better just to lower our expectations,adjust to reality, and accept, to some provisional extent, theassessments of more sober evaluations of the archaeologicalrecord, such as those long ago advanced by C. Hawkes andE. Leach. Knowledge of the past still can advance, and ourreconstructions of it will only ring true if we are attuned, assensitively as the evidence permits, to considerations ofintentions, meanings, cultural values, and the like. In otherwords, a basic uniformitarian principle must be invoked: o urunderstanding of the past must resemble our understandingof the present, and a world in which meanings, cultural

differences, and beliefs play only an inconsequential,secondary role is an incomprehensible world, not the one inwhich I live. For me, this is the ultimate objection to the"animalism" of the new processual archaeology: the con-temporary world is not exclusively shaped by demographicand environmental factors, an external reality that makes mestrongly suspicious that the past was either. If we shouldconsider prehistory as an extension of history, the ultimatelongue duree, and if we need intellectual gurus for guidan ce,I suggest we read practicing historians who have reflectedsoberly on their craft and the limitations of their data.M. Bloch and E. H. Carr strike me as far better guides forarchaeologists than Collingwood.

Processual and post-processual archaeology compared:continuities as progress or regress?Such suggestions are perhaps too sensible, commonplace;our critical edge is no longer sharp. Clearly, we have notsufficiently followed Shanks and Tilley's dictum to reflectcritically "upon archaeology as a discipline in the present."We w ill conclude not by contrasting, but by comparing p ost-processual to processual archaeology. Certain features mustbe shared, for, as noted above, when considering processualand post-processual archaeology we are dealing withphenomena largely of the Anglo-American world ofscholarship and research.

How should we analyze this social reality critically^.We cannot here cast our analysis so broadly as to review allthe distinctive, relevant shared features of British andAmerican culture evident in the new and post-new archae-ology. We can only briefly examine some commoncharacteristics internal to the discipline itself. Perhaps wecan profitably proceed as structuralists, following onefruitful means for reading the past that Hodder advocates?Let us try:

Processual archaeology:post-processual archaeology ::Binford:Hodder :: materialism:idealism :: etic:emic ::Hempel:Collingwood :: testing hypotheses:reading thepast:: Academic Press:Cambridge University Press (andnow perhaps B lack we ll 's) . . . ad nauseam.

This approach may have limited possibilities for a trulycritical social analysis, but it has uncovered a certainsymmetry: post-processualists define them selves in opposedrelation to their processual forbears. Fashions in Anglo-American archaeology resemble one another - howeverinverted the forms they assume.

Perhaps, a literary critical analysis, a deconstruction ofthe canonical texts of processual and post-processual archae-ology, will take us further? Certain shared stylistic traits can


29/150

18 Philip L. Kohl

easily be traced: the polemical, combative styles of Binfordand Hodder; the rushed, relevant, urgent prose of Watson,Redman, and LeBlanc, on the one hand, and Shanks andTilley on the other; a certain style of preaching, akin toreligious proselytization, carried out with the certainty thatone has been blessed with special inspiration and insight forpredicting or reading the past; the use of little archaeo logicalvignettes or examples, as opposed to extended analysesof significant prehistoric problems, to illustrate one'sinsight; a rush to publication and an admitted ability to getpublished all types of articles from graduate student seminarreports to the personal recollections of remarkably youngscholars.

Behind such shared traits, the critical analyst perceivesbroader social forces at work. These range from the structureof the publishing industry in the Anglo-American world(dominated, of course, by profit-making capitalist consider-ations) through the ways in which knowledge is producedand sold in British and American universities to the mostsignificant criterion of all: how academic careers areestablished and lifetime sinecures obtained within theseuniversities. Far less than in countries with centralizedresearch archaeological institutes, like France or the formerSoviet Union, is there any rea l structural imperative actuallyto dig. If one simply writes enough and in a polemical and,above all, sufficiently innovative style so as to convince apublisher that this material will sell, and be assigned forgraduate and undergraduate instruction, one has fulfilledone 's duty to the profession and to oneself. Here it is relevantto relate an anecdote illustrating the immense structuraldifference separating the praxis of continental European/Soviet archaeology from American archaeology.

Soviet archaeologists who visited Wa shington, D.C. in thespring of 1986 to attend the third USA- US SR archaeologicalsymposium were informed on the last day of the conferencethat their work was tradition-bound, tied to cultural-historical reconstruction of the sort Americans engaged inroughly half a century ago. Further, in the words of thisconcluding critique, relative to their Soviet colleagues,American archaeologists peered through more theoretical"windows of observation" on the past. Rather than beinghumiliated at this assessment, one Soviet archaeologist wasoverheard to ask - not rhetorically, but sincerely - acolleague who had visited the States before, "Do Americanarchaeologists ever excavate?"

In an otherwise intelligent article, frequently cited fornoting Anglo-American archaeology's tendency for joiningtardily different theoretical bandwagons, Mark Leone wrotewhat I have always considered the silliest and, in a sense,most telling assertion of the then actually new processualarchaeology.

. . . the reconstruction of events in the past is nearlycomplete; it offers little in the way of challenge today.And once the outline is in hand, there will remain nothingmore than the prehistoric analogues to those studiesproduced in history under the rubric, "History of thethree-tined fork." (Leone 1972: 26)

There is no reason to refute the idiocy of this statement.Anyone who has sincerely attempted to reconstruct theprehistoric past appreciates that what we do not know orunderstand always is far more impressive than w hat actuallyhas been discovered and plausibly reconstructed. Nor is itsufficient to say, such were the follies of youth, that, ofcourse, there was much naivete evident, even predictable, inthose exciting days when a new archaeological paradigmwas forged. The same follies are being enacted today in adifferent guise. One important thread of continuity linkingprocessual to post-processual Anglo-American archaeologyis the sort of casual dismissal, bordering on disrespect ordisregard, for what should be the primary archaeologicaltask: adequately accounting for - that is, reconstructing and,as best we can, explaining - an ever-expanding, nevercomplete material culture record. Post-processual archae-ology 's frequent lack of concern with significant prehistoricproblems illustrates this tendency and is thoroughlyconsistent with Leone's mistaken belief in a completelyknown prehistoric past.

This is not a call to return to the trenches, to dig for its ownsake. Despite certain irritating self-indulgent, narcissisticfeatures, the self-conscious theorizing and epistemologicalsoul-searching characteristic of both processual and post-processual Anglo-American archaeology has an undeniablypositive, stimulating side. As it results in a more satisfactoryand complete account of the past, we applaud it. Theproblem is that writing little books or editing collectedvolumes for Cambridge University Press's New Directionsin Archaeology series should not.substitute for, but rathercomplement, more traditional archaeological a

who sets the agenda_ (new directions in archaeology)-cambridge university press (1993)

Documents