Archaeology After Interpretation

Returning Materials to Archaeological Theory

Benjamin Alberti, Andrew Meirion Jones, Joshua Pollard, Benjamin Alberti, Andrew Meirion Jones, Joshua Pollard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315434230
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

A new generation of archaeologists has thrown down a challenge to post-processual theory, arguing that characterizing material symbols as arbitrary overlooks the material character and significance of artifacts. This volume showcases the significant departure from previous symbolic approaches that is underway in the discipline. It brings together key scholars advancing a variety of cutting edge approaches, each emphasizing an understanding of artifacts and materials not in terms of symbols but relationally, as a set of associations that compose people's understanding of the world. Authors draw on a diversity of intellectual sources and case studies, paving a dynamic road ahead for archaeology as a discipline and theoretical approaches to material culture.

Chapter One
Archaeology after Interpretation

Andrew Meirion Jones and Benjamin Alberti (with contributions from Chris Fowler and Gavin Lucas)

What do we mean by "archaeology after interpretation"? The purpose of this introduction is to explain this phrase and introduce some of the themes of the book. To be clear, in discussing an "archaeology after interpretation," we do not reject the utility of theoretical discussion in archaeology (contra Bintliff & Pearce 2012); indeed we would argue that archaeology (or any scientific or scholarly discipline) without theory is an oxymoron. Instead, "archaeology after interpretation" is a statement by theoretically oriented archaeologists about the current shift in archaeological thinking from questions of interpretation as a post hoc in a continuous enterprise to a position that accepts the fully relational and constitutive character of all practices.

We intend the phrase "archaeology after interpretation" to denote two things. First, it distinguishes contributions to this book from the intellectual outlook known as interpretative archaeology (or interpretive archaeology) that characterized the early 1990s (e.g., Tilley 1993; Shanks & Hodder 1995; Thomas 2000); in that sense, our phrase signifies "archaeology after interpretation." Second, it highlights the elusive and changeable nature of archaeological interpretation. We recognize that archaeologists are always after interpretation, in the sense that they are attempting to grasp or get at interpretation(s). In fact, what interpretation is becomes an open question. In highlighting a distinction from Interpretative Archaeology we intend to foreground and take stock of developments in archaeological thought by addressing fundamental changes in the epistemological and ontological character of archaeological thought over the past decade. In that sense our aims are closer to the "quiet revolution" imagined by anthropologists Amiria Henare, Martin Holbraad, and Sari Wastell (2007, 7), who argued for a shift away from epistemological questions.

Perhaps contradictorily, what we are alter is what happens during interpretation, which is where the question of ontology lies: What kind of work is involved in the co-emergence of interpretation and reality, and what role do materials play in this process? Like Henare et al. (2007), we see the fundamental shift in archaeological thinking as a reorientation from questions of an essentially epistemological nature—what constitutes archaeological knowledge and how we go about securing it—to concerns of an ontological kind: What are archaeological entities and what is the real character of archaeological thought and practice? Certain key themes have percolated to the surface in archaeological work and signposted this shift. The "brute materiality" of given matter has been questioned, and is now understood to be imbued with vibrancy and enlivened by innate energy (Conneller 2011; Hodder 2012; Jones 2012). Bergson's claim (1999) that it is material stability, not movement, that has to be explained exemplifies this position. This is a world of fluidity, process, change, and contingency. We see, consequently, a return to materials and a rethinking of the notion of "material agency" beyond the confines of human exceptionalism. "Relationality" is another key term, which challenges any claims to preexistent fixed substances. The modernist substance ontology of "mind" and "matter" gives way to relational ontologies; essentialist "objects" and "subjects" give way to relational identities, persons, and entities, in which dividing lines are not pre-drawn (Alberti et al. 2011; see contributors to Alberti & Bray 2009). The new direction in archaeology, then, has much in common with posthumanism—the critique of the reduction of explanation in the social sciences to the human, and the recognition that there is no ontologically marked category of the human that can serve a priori—as the basis of natural philosophy (Haraway 2008). Linked to this is a critique of the necessity of mediation by humans or culture in understanding the nature of the world, which brings post-humanist scholars to lean towards non-representationalist thinking. How can we understand belief, image, memory, society, and other apparent abstractions without resorting to the representationalist gambit of an interpreting subject/culture quite distinct from the world she/he interprets, but also without resorting to the opposite side of the same coin, the natural scientists' steadfast belief in a correlative theory of truth? Work in this line has produced analyses that stress the necessarily non-reductive material nature of such ideas (e.g., Jones 2007 in the case of memory; Lucas 2012 in the case of the archaeological record; see also Edgeworth 2012 for the process of interpretation in archaeological fieldwork).

All this work can be characterized by a desire to integrate the best thinking and categories available to us from the hard sciences with the type of social theory that came out of the archaeology of the 1980s and 1990s. Earlier post-processual efforts to integrate the sciences and humanities in archaeology were very much about using both traditions for a common goal derived from the humanities and humanist thinking (e.g., Hodder 1999). More recently, though, archaeologists have stressed the common goals of theoretical traditions in the hard sciences, social sciences, and humanities, all of which move beyond humanism (e.g., Jones 2004, 2012; Lucas 2012). The hard and natural sciences are no longer seen just as a source of techniques for data production but as theoretically sophisticated. A balanced account requires considering theoretical perspectives from both, not using results from scientific techniques in an "interpretative" approach.

Interpretation and Diversity

There is no radical intellectual break heralded by Archaeology after Interpretation. Rather, there is a return to theoretical influences long felt in archaeology but now reread alongside new voices. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, British, Scandinavian, and American archaeology witnessed a major paradigm shift from an approach dominated by positivist scientific outlooks—new or processual archaeology—to one characterized by constructivist approaches drawn from the humanities and social sciences—post-processual archaeology. With the publication of seminal volumes such as Symbolic and Structural Archaeology (Hodder 1982), the later publications of Shanks and Tilley (1987a, 1987b), and the reappraisal of pioneering books such as In Small Things Forgotten (Deetz 1977), archaeologists were introduced at a stroke to a diversity of approaches including neo-Marxism, structuralism, feminism, and a variety of post-structuralist positions. The significance of these volumes cannot be overstated, as they heralded a phase of experimentation and creativity in archaeology; indeed, the eclectic and contradictory nature of post-processual archaeology was actively promoted (Hodder 1992, 86–87). Arguably, the diversity of approaches began to ossify towards the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s as certain themes began to be emphasized over others; it is during this phase of development that we witness the emergence of interpretative archaeology. In what follows we will critically review a series of concepts that have emerged from this discourse. We will revisit some familiar philosophical figures that have underpinned the development of post-processual and interpretative archaeology, including Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and the less familiar Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Karen Barad, and Bruno Latour. In readdressing the works of these philosophers and their application in post-processual and interpretative archaeology we do not wish to imply that there is a correct way to read these authors, but rather that certain themes have been emphasized by post-processual and interpretative archaeologists at the expense of others (see also Olsen 2003, 2007). In this introduction, our primary focus is on the nature of the interpreting subject, but we also discuss the analysis of context in archaeology and the notion of material symbols and material culture studies. In each case our argument is that—despite their rhetoric—post-processual and interpretative archaeologies have in many cases produced surprisingly static and formal visions of past life. Our aim, in returning to these key intellectual figures, is to bring to light elements of their work that in fact stress the importance of fluidity and process. We are therefore able to trace the origins of the type of thinking represented by contributors to Archaeology after Interpretation, which rests on a reconsideration of the position of the human subject as the preeminent figure in archaeological analyses.

From the Interpreting Subject to the Relational Person

The key emphasis in early formulations of the post-processual approach was on the nature of interpretation, that is on the interpretative position of the archaeologist in relation to excavated artifacts from the past. Shanks and Tilley (1987a, 107–8) proposed a hermeneutic (or interpretative) position for archaeology in which archaeologists not only interpret between "our" world and "their" world, as anthropologists do, but also interpret historically between the past and the present (see also Shanks & Hodder 1995, 10). Both Tilley (1993) and Shanks and Hodder (1995) describe the importance of the archaeologist as the person who sifts the indeterminate nature of evidence from the past to produce plausible statements about that past; the primary goal of the archaeologist is to interpret. We do not wish to argue that the primary goal of archaeology should not be interpretation, although we will question the character of that interpretative process and the role of archaeologists in it. The significance of interpretation was perhaps forged in the early days of post-processual archaeology in contradiction to the criticisms of processual archaeologists; interpretation emerged then as an important mission statement for post-processual archaeologists. One of the consequences of this was that the centrality of interpretation to the archaeological project was mapped onto archaeologists' understanding of the human subject in the past. Like the archaeologist in the present, the human actor in the post-processual past is ultimately an interpreting subject. Witness the individual patrolling past prehistoric landscapes in Tilley's accounts, constantly aware of the changing circumstances of the environment, always aware of the symbolic significance of distant mountain views in relation to built structures (e.g., Tilley 1994, 2004). In another example, the literature on agency in archaeology includes interpreting subjects (or knowledgeable agents) who make informed—if limited—decisions concerning their ability to alter and change the worlds they inhabit (e.g., Dobres & Robb 2000; Gardiner 2004).

The interpreting subject of archaeology exists in a world of representations, dominated by the meaning and significance of the world; the world only has significance to the subject in that it is converted to meaningful symbols. The consequence is a reification of the separation and a privileging of the role of the human subject. An alternative view is to see the person as always being in a process of interaction with the world, as was emphasized in phenomenological approaches in archaeology (e.g., Gosden 1994; Tilley 1994; Thomas 1996); though—as noted above—there remains a tendency in phenomenological accounts to retain a distinction between world and interpreting subject (see Olsen 2007; Fuglestvedt 2009). Instead, we argue that action should not be seen simply as a unidirectional process running from the actor to the acted upon, from the active to the passive, from mind to matter (Anderson & Harrison 2010, 7). With geographers Beth Greenhough (2010) and Sarah What-more (2008), and political theorist Jane Bennett (2001, 2010), we argue that rather than placing primary emphasis on the interpreting subject as having the sole capacity for action and interpretation we need to remember that action takes place with and alongside other active agencies in the world. These are not surrogates for humans—their agency a derived form of human agency, as much material agency theory in archaeology would have it—nor the active material culture conceived by Hodder (1986), but are rather constituted by the same processes as humans and are therefore coproductive of the world. The idea of a meaningful and ongoing relationship between subject and world is not new in archaeology; it is the nature and the prominence given to that relationship in relation to other relationships that changes.

This perspective is presaged to an extent in the work of Michel Foucault (1972, 1981). Interestingly, whereas the work of Foucault was utilized by earlier writers in archaeology to discuss the significance of power as discourse (e.g., Miller & Tilley 1984) and the body as site of discourse (Meskell 1996), we also observe in his work a disquiet about the violence done to the world by a recourse to symbolic analysis. Foucault (1981, 67) writes: "We must not imagine that the world turns towards us a legible face which we only have to decipher; the world is not the accomplice of our knowledge; there is no prediscursive providence which disposes the world in our favor." The agency of the world therefore intersects or even crosscuts human understanding, a point taken up and developed in Karen Barad's "new materialist" (2007) development of Foucault's work.

In this respect we highlight the important work of Julian Thomas (2002) in examining the problematic emphasis on humanist perspectives in recent archaeological interpretations. He associates humanism with the notion of the autonomous and rational individual, and traces its relationship to the political philosophy of modernity and liberalism. He calls for an antihumanist perspective, drawing on the work of Judith Butler (1990, 1993), to suggest that bodies and individuals are materialized, or continually undergo a performative process. This perspective radically questions the security and integrity of the essential individual or identity, and it leads us to reposition the human subject as a relational and performative construction (Fowler 2004). Rather than viewing the interpreting subject as the seat of reason and cognition, we shift then to an image of the relational and fractal person positioned in a set of unfolding relationships. As Chris Fowler (2010, 141) notes, "The image of the 'fractal' illustrates that there are really no social 'wholes,' only unfolding relationships which can be viewed at different scales," Such an image allows the person to be viewed as situated in a complex field...