Artifacts and Ideas

Essays in Archaeology

Bruce Trigger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780765801654
• eBook ISBN: 9781351324069
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

Prehistoric archaeologists cannot observe their human subjects nor can they directly access their subjects' ideas. Both must be inferred from the remnants of the material objects they made and used. In recent decades this incontrovertible fact has encouraged partisan approaches to the history and method of archaeology. An empirical discipline emphasizing data, classification, and chronology has given way to a behaviorist approach that interprets finds as products of ecologically adaptive strategies, and to a postmodern alternative that relies on an idealist, cultural-relativist epistemology based on belief and cultural traditions.

In Artifacts and Ideas, Bruce G. Trigger challenges all partisan versions of recent developments in archaeology, while remaining committed to understanding the past from a social science perspective. Over 30 years, Trigger has addressed fundamental epistemological issues, and opposed the influence of narrow theoretical and ideological commitments on archaeological interpretation since the 1960s. Trigger encourages a relativistic understanding of archaeological interpretation. Yet as post-processual archaeology, influenced by postmodernism, became increasingly influential, Trigger countered nihilistic subjectivism by laying greater emphasis on how in the long run the constraints of evidence could be expected to produce a more comprehensive and objective understanding of the past.

In recent years Trigger has argued that while all human behavior is culturally mediated, the capacity for such mediation has evolved as a flexible and highly efficient means by which humans adapt to a world that exists independently of their will. Trigger agrees that a complete understanding of what has shaped the archaeological record requires knowledge both of past beliefs and of human behavior. He knows also that one must understand humans as organisms with biologically grounded drives, emotions, and means of understanding. Likewise, even in the absence of data supplied in a linguistic format by texts and oral traditions, at least some of the more ecologically adaptive forms of human behavior and some general patterns of belief that display cross-cultural uniformity will be susceptible to archaeological analysis.Advocating a realist epistemology and a materialist ontology, Artifacts and Ideas offers an illuminating guide to the present state of the discipline as well as to how archaeology can best achieve its goals.

Introduction

Introduction: Understanding the Material Remains of the Past

Archaeology might have been invented specifically as a case study for the philosophy of science. While some archaeologists narrowly define the ultimate goal of their discipline as being to explain the archaeological record (Clarke 1968; Dunnell 1971; Schiffer 1976), the vast majority regard their discipline as a social science, the goals of which are to trace the evolution of culture, behavior, and human beings themselves, to delineate the history of individual societies prior to written records, and to ascertain how groups of humans lived in prehistoric times. In Europe, archaeologists tend to identify themselves as historians, while in North America, prehistoric archaeology is a branch of anthropology. Studying human behavior and culture is a task common to both archaeologists and anthropologists.

Yet, with respect to the study of behavior and culture, archaeology is a challenged discipline. Unlike all social scientists, except historians, archaeologists are unable to observe human behavior directly and they have no direct access to human thoughts, whether expressed verbally or in writing. Behavior and ideas must be inferred from the material remains of the past and from the impact humans once had on the environment. Many forms of material culture do not survive for archaeologists to study, except in environments marked by extreme cold or aridity, and the artifacts that do survive are often found in contexts of disposal, not where they were used. To infer human behavior or beliefs from such data is a demanding task and an operation that leaves great scope for subjectivity. The paucity of evidential constraint renders archaeology a very revealing example of how data are interpreted by social scientists.

Archaeologists also provide interesting information about how they view what they have accomplished under these challenging circumstances. They are constantly seeking ways to understand the past more completely and effectively. Yet, when it comes to trying to comprehend what they do, or have done in the past, archaeologists, like most other social scientists, tend to prefer self-justifying myths (Kuhn 1962; Trigger 1989a). American archaeologists generally believe that, prior to the 1960s, archaeology was an empirical discipline whose practitioners were content to collect data about the past, classify artifacts, and define chronologies and past cultures. They also agree that, beginning in the 1960s, archaeology was impacted by a positivist epistemology that favored behaviorism and sought to interpret finds as products of ecologically adaptive strategies. In the 1980s, this approach was challenged by an idealist, cultural-relativist epistemology that stressed beliefs and cultural traditions as mediating, and to a large degree determining, human behavior. The two more recent approaches have come to be labeled processual and postprocessual archaeology. They are antithetically associated with two archaeologists: Lewis Binford and Ian Hodder (Willey & Sabloff 1974; 1993).

It is also generally agreed that prior to the 1960s archaeology was either a dismal failure or represented only the primitive, preparadigmatic beginnings of a scientific discipline (Clarke 1973; Sterud 1973). Many archaeologists argue that processual archaeology not only was the first scientific approach to archaeological interpretation, but also is an approach that can never be transcended except to archaeology’s extreme detriment (Binford 1972; 1983b; 1989). Postprocessual archaeologists denounce the innovations of the 1960s as a dehumanizing, technocratic blind alley, from which archaeology has been rescued only by their own insistence on beliefs, perceptions, goals, and values as the central foci for explaining human behavior (Hodder 1986; Shanks & Tilley 1987a; 1987b). In recent years, Darwinian or evolutionary archaeology has been striving, with some success, to establish itself as a materialist substitute for processual archaeology (Barton & Clark 1997; Dunnell 1980b; Maschner 1996; O’Brien 1996; O’Brien & Lyman 2000; Teltser 1995). Yet adherents of this school are far from agreed about how selection shapes the archaeological record. Most processual and postprocessual archaeologists, while believing that their approach is the correct one, also agree that their two approaches exhaust the full range of interpretive possibilities.

I have been uncomfortable with these partisan versions of the history of archaeology, because they do not correspond with the development of archaeological theory and practice as I have observed it since the 1950s. Over the years, I publicly recorded my disagreements with successive fashions of doing archaeology. These efforts stimulated my interest in studying the development of archaeological interpretation in its social and intellectual context, which culminated in the publication of A History of Archaeological Thought (1989a). My motivation for this research is my belief best expressed by George Santayana’s observation that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

The essays reprinted in this volume represent my efforts to formulate an epistemological perspective that would facilitate my study of the past and help others to negotiate the theoretical minefields of anthropological archaeology. While I have been critical, at various times, of views held by both processual and postprocessual archaeologists, I have sought to cultivate what I believe to be of value in both approaches, while exposing and rejecting the dogmatic humbug that accompanies them.

These efforts have convinced me that even a judicious synthesis of these two approaches supplies only a partial explanation of human behavior and the archaeological record. It seems that, for political reasons, and in their desire to achieve their goals quickly, archaeologists of various persuasions have too often embraced epistemologies that did not fully reflect the complexity of what they were studying. The essays that follow represent my attempts, with one exception since 1980, to encourage a more realistic appreciation of the problems archaeology is facing. In the rest of this introductory essay, I will review the circumstances in which each essay was written and relate them to each other as well as to changing modes of interpretation in archaeology.

Archaeology in the 1950s

When I studied archaeology as an undergraduate at the University of Toronto in the late 1950s, the discipline was still in what is now called its culture-historical phase. At its worst, American culture-historical archaeology was as dreadful as processual archaeologists later made it out to be. In the 1930s, archaeologists based mainly at the University of Chicago and the University of Michigan advocated what they called the Midwestern Taxonomic Method (McKern 1939). They argued that the main task of archaeologists was to define artifact types and use these types to distinguish archaeological cultures, which they equated with prehistoric peoples. Cultural change was attributed to diffusion and migration. There was no awareness of significant changes coming about as a result of processes occurring within cultures. Many archaeologists accepted that they were restricted to studying material culture and believed that there was no way to infer prehistoric ideas or behavior from the archaeological record alone. Archaeologists adhering to the Midwestern Taxonomic Method condemned efforts to infer behavior from archaeological data as speculative and unscientific.

I learned about the origins of these ideas only much later, when I studied the history of archaeology. Much of European prehistoric archaeology and of American anthropology, in the institutional framework of which American prehistoric archaeology had developed, was influenced by the work of the late nineteenth-century German anthropogeographer Friedrich Ratzel (1882–91; 1896–98), which in turn was steeped in the traditions of German idealism and romanticism. In an era of growing nationalism and middle-class opposition to socialism, many social scientists sought to counter the Marxist concept of class struggle with the belief that each specific people was united by a common culture that distinguished them from all other peoples. As the spread of industrialization led to increasing international conflicts over access to resources and markets in the late nineteenth century, historians, in their efforts to maintain social peace in their own countries, sought to suppress class conflicts within nation states and to direct aggression outward. Humans were represented as being naturally conservative and resistant to change (Trigger 1989a: 110–167). Yet, where racism was not yet dominant in social science thinking, variations among cultures continued to be celebrated as evidence of human creativity, following a tradition that could be traced back to the German philosopher Johann Herder in the late eighteenth century. Franz Boas introduced these ideas to North America and with them the culture-historical approach to archaeology.

As an undergraduate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto, I encountered the 1950s version of the Midwestern Taxonomic Method in the person of the department’s senior archaeologist, Chicago-trained Norman Emerson. Under his tutelage, I and many other students learned to dig sites, classify pottery, and how archaeological cultures were identified. The great debate convulsing Ontario archaeology in the late 1950s was whether the local Iroquoian Indians had evolved in the Toronto area and later migrated 200 kilometers north to their historic homeland on Georgian Bay or had originally lived in the north and some of them had expanded southward (Emerson 1961; MacNeish 1952; Ridley 1952a; 1952b). It seemed strange to me even as an undergraduate that no one involved in this debate was interested in trying to ascertain why people might have moved in one direction or the other (Trigger 1962; 1963). The anthropologists in the department, whether they were old-fashioned cultural anthropologists, British social anthropologists, or influenced by American neoevolutionary trends, were openly contemptuous of this sort of archaeology, and of archaeology in general, which they regarded as an atheoretical discipline doomed to remain forever the antiquarian study of material culture. The head of the department, Thomas Mcllwraith, privately expressed the opinion that an intelligent undergraduate would not wish to become an archaeologist.

Fortunately, much more than this was happening to archaeology in the late 1950s. Already in the 1920s, archaeologists in the Soviet Union had argued the need to understand prehistoric social organization in order to explain technological change. Marxist theory was interpreted as indicating that such change did not occur as a result of people using their natural intelligence to control nature more effectively, as nineteenth-century evolutionary archaeologists had believed; instead it was stimulated or discouraged by socioeconomic conditions. Efforts to infer social conditions led Soviet archaeologists to identify and excavate Palaeolithic houses and entire Neolithic villages for the first time and to seek ways to infer social organization from archaeological evidence. For example, P.N. Tret’ yakov, having determined from forensic studies of fingerprints that the ceramic vessels associated with prehistoric hunter-fisher cultures in northern and central Russia had probably been manufactured by women, proceeded to infer that the uniformity of pottery styles within individual sites indicated matrilocal marriage patterns (Trigger 1989a: 207–243).

The work of Soviet archaeologists was made known in the West by the Finnish archaeologist A.M. Tallgren (1936) and by Gordon Childe (1942). Beginning in the late 1930s, Childe shifted from a culture-historical approach to one focused on changing patterns of social organization (Childe 1946a). At the same time, Grahame Clark (1939), inspired by Tallgren and other Scandinavian archaeologists, began to study prehistoric cultures as adaptive systems, placing a strong emphasis on their subsistence patterns and social organization. In the United States, large-scale excavations carried out in the 1930s under federal government sponsorship to provide work for the unemployed led to a growing awareness of prehistoric community patterns and the possibility of studying how indigenous peoples had lived in these communities in prehistoric times (Fagette 1996; Lyon 1996). The cultural ecologist Julian Steward and the archaeologist F.M. Setzler argued that, because archaeologists could study subsistence practices, population size, and settlement patterns, they controlled the major variables necessary to understand social change (Steward & Setzler 1938). Walter Taylor (1948), while loyal to Boasian cultural idealism, called for more subsistence studies in archaeology and for more efforts to understand the meaning that artifacts had in the cultures that produced them.

While these advances were interrupted by the suspension of archaeological research during the Second World War, they resumed in the late 1940s. Julian Steward persuaded the archaeologist Gordon Willey to carry out the first regional study of changing settlement patterns as part of the Viru Valley project. Willey collected information about the size, distribution, and formal characteristics of prehistoric settlements in this small valley on the north coast of Peru and used these data to study changes in subsistence patterns, demography, social organization, and political structure from the beginnings of agriculture in the area to the Spanish conquest (Willey 1953). Within a few years, archaeologists were studying settlement patterns around the world (R. Adams 1965; Sanders, Parsons & Santley 1979; Willey 1956). Grahame Clark (1954) organized a multidisciplinary excavation of the Mesolithic site of Star Carr in East Yorkshire, interpreting it as a camp that a small group of hunters had revisited over a number of winters to hunt deer. This study set a new standard for the archaeological investigation of hunter-gatherer sites. At Jarmo, in Iraq, Robert Braidwood (1974) carried out the first detailed study of the origins of agriculture, demonstrating that in the Middle East it had been a very gradual process. Richard MacNeish (1978) made similar findings in the Tehuacan Valley of Mexico in the 1960s. In eastern North America, Joseph Caldwell (1958) argued that ecological and demographic changes were able to explain alterations in the archaeological record that had hitherto been attributed to migration and cultural diffusion.

As an undergraduate at the University of Toronto, I became aware of some of these developments. Encouraged by the brilliant ancient economic historian, Fritz Heichelheim, I read many of Childe’s works, including his last, and posthumously published, The Prehistory of European Society (1958). In this synthesis, he argued that the social and political organization of prehistoric Europe displayed much less variation than did the stylistic aspects of its material culture. Childe hoped that a more significant understanding of the past might be derived if archaeologists adopted a social and political approach to interpreting archaeological data. This proposal resonated powerfully with the functionalist and behaviorist British social anthropology that I was learning about in the anthropology department. I drew most inspiration, however, not from the then mainline social anthropology expounded by my teachers, which was focused on the analysis of static structures. This approach included Edmund Leach’s (1954) pseudohistorical Political Systems of Highland Burma. My greatest admiration was reserved for the functionalist study of social change as represented by E.E. Evans-Pritchard’s (1949; see also 1962) The Sanusi of Cyrenaica, which sought to understand cultural integration by observing how social structures changed over time among a single people. I was, however, disappointed that Childe at the end of his book was unable to suggest ways to study prehistoric social and political organization.

I first encountered Willey’s (1953) Prehistoric Settlement Patterns in the Viru Valley, Peru, when I was required to report on it in a course taught by a young American archaeologist, William J. Mayer-Oakes. One of the aims of this course was to acquaint students with the newest developments in North American archaeology. I realized how it was possible to infer social, economic, and political information from archaeological data and use it to study systemic changes in prehistoric times. St Paul’s experience on the Damascus Road was scarcely more dramatic or transforming. I now knew how to do the kind of archaeology I had wished to do and how archaeology could address issues that anthropologists had long believed were the preserve of social and cultural anthropology. My long-term commitment to archaeology was sealed.

As a graduate student at Yale University in the early 1960s, I became involved in archaeological salvage work associated with the UNESCO Campaign to Save the Monuments of Nubia, an area that was threatened by the construction of the High Dam at Aswan. My doctoral thesis, published as History and Settlement in Lower Nubia, drew upon archaeological settlement data that had been collected systematically throughout Lower Nubia since 1907 in connection with earlier dam-building projects (Trigger 1965). I attempted to demonstrate that changes in four variables—environment, agricultural technology, and trade and warfare between Egypt and the Sudan—accounted for most of the alterations in the population size and distribution of population during 6,000 years, from the introduction of agriculture to the conversion of Lower Nubia to Islam ca. A.D. 1300. My attempt to identify and rank key variables bringing about changes in settlement patterns in a particular region was different from studies that used settlement data merely as an archaeological source of information about societies or which studied specific problems, such as the relation between the development of irrigation works and that of states (R. Adams 1965).

Processual Archaeology

By the time my thesis was published, a new kid had appeared on the block: New Archaeology, later to be known as processual archaeology. The term “New Archaeology” had been adumbrated in a paper titled “The New American Archaeology,” which Joseph Caldwell (1959) published in the journal Science. Yet New Archaeology, as a specific set of concepts and as a movement, was the creation of Lewis Binford (1962; 1965; 1972). Binford violently rejected culture-historical archaeology as it was associated with the Midwestern Taxonomic Method and the person of James B. Griffin, who taught at the University of Michigan where Binford studied for his doctorate. From his mentor, evolutionary anthropologist Leslie White (1949), Binford adopted the idea that a culture was a system composed of three interrelated subsystems: the technoeconomic, the social, and the ideational. He further argued that, because artifacts functionally relate to all three subsystems, formal artifact assemblages and their contexts could be made to yield a comprehensive picture of total extinct cultures. Binford also championed the proposition that cultures were humanity’s extrasomatic means of adaptation. Changes in all aspects of cultural systems could therefore be explained as adaptive responses to alterations in environment, demography, or competing cultural systems. The technoeconomic subsystem shaped the social and ideational ones.

In practice, Binford’s primary focus was on human behavior rather than on culture. He rejected the proposition that either culturally specific ideas or human psychology were appropriate objects of scientific research. Binford also subscribed to the currently popular neoevolutionist belief that human behavior was highly uniform and believed that societies everywhere in the world that were at the same level of development would closely resemble one another (Fried 1967; Sahlins 1968; Service 1962; 1975). As a result of his acceptance of the uniformity of human behavior, Binford became an even more radical uniformitarian than was Leslie White (1945: 346), who believed that, while evolutionary theories account for the general outlines of cultural development, they could not be used to infer the specific features of individual cultures. He also went beyond Steward’s (1955) prescription that, while evolutionary anthropologists should seek to account for the common features observed in cultures at similar levels of development, they should ignore their “unique, exotic, and non-recurrent particulars” (p. 209). Binford maintained that beliefs and values, whether cross-culturally regular or idiosyncratic, should be treated as epiphenomenal aspects of human behavior that arose as a consequence of ecological adaptation and therefore had no explanatory value in an ecological context.

Finally, at an epistemological level, Binford embraced a positivist, covering-law model of explanation derived from the philosopher Carl Hempel (1965; Hempel & Oppenheim 1948). All behavioral inferences from archaeological data had to be based on the demonstration of invariant correlations between material culture and human behavior in the modern world. Such findings, in turn, could be used to confirm or reject generalizations about human behavior derived from high-level propositions that Binford advocated should be grounded in cultural ecology. Underlying this approach was a Humean view that held sensory observations to be unproblematic, equated explanation with establishing regularities among observed phenomena, and treated explanation and prediction as equivalent (Binford 1972; Schiffer 1975; Spaulding 1968; Watson, LeBlanc & Redman 1971: 3–19). Binford’s belief in the regularity of human behavior led him to assume that cross-cultural research would ensure the rapid establishment of a series of generalizations concerning human behavior. Integral to th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1. Introduction: Understanding the Material Remains of the Past
• 2. Engels on the Part Played by Labor in the Transition from Ape to Man: An Anticipation of Contemporary Archaeological Theory
• 3. Archaeology and the Image of the American Indian
• 4. Alternative Archaeologies: Nationalist, Colonialist, Imperialist
• 5. Archaeology at the Crossroads: What’s New?
• 6. Hyperrelativism, Responsibility, and the Social Sciences
• 7. Archaeology and Epistemology: Dialoguing across the Darwinian Chasm
• 8. The Real, the Perceived, and the Imagined
• 9. Imagination and Scientific Curiosity
• 10. The 1990s: North American Archaeology with a Human Face?
• References
• Index