A Future for Archaeology

Robert Layton, Stephen Shennan, Peter Stone, Robert Layton, Stephen Shennan, Peter Stone

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315435794
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Archéologie

Over the last thirty years issues of culture, identity and meaning have moved out of the academic sphere to become central to politics and society at all levels from the local to the global. Archaeology has been at the forefront of these moves towards a greater engagement with the non-academic world, often in an extremely practical and direct way, for example in the disputes about the repatriation of human burials. Such disputes have been central to the recognition that previously marginalized groups have rights in their own past that are important for their future. The essays in this book look back at some of the most important events where a role for an archaeology concerned with the past in the present first emerged and look forward to the practical and theoretical issues now central to a socially engaged discipline and shaping its future. This book is published in honor of Professor Peter Ucko, who has played an unparalleled role in promoting awareness of the core issues in this volume among archaeologists.

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

Robert Layton, Stephen Shennan and Peter Stone

Archaeology is my interest and my life. I believe and teach that the study of the past is important for all, from primary school children to adults. I believe that to be able to identify with a past, and to be proud of it, helps people to have respect for themselves and for the group of people from whom they have derived.

(Peter Ucko, Academic Freedom and Apartheid, p. 5)

The wide and diverse spread of authors, subjects and geographical areas represented in this book reflect the extraordinary range of interests, and breadth of vision, that Peter Ucko has brought to archaeology (and, we hope and expect, will continue to bring for many years to come). In this short introduction we trace the early years of Peter’s career, before the momentous events that are charted by other contributors. We also try to emphasize some of the key threads to Peter’s life and work. We do this not as a reflection on a career ended but as a comment on a career that is changing focus, a career that has influenced his chosen discipline perhaps more than any other scholar of his generation.

Archaeology became the dominant interest in Peter’s life long before he became a student in the late 1950s. As a young child he saved all his pocket money to buy small Egyptian artefacts that he found in unlikely places such as Portobello Road market – a collections policy that would be utterly frowned upon today by most archaeologists but one that led him directly to undertake his undergraduate studies in the Anthropology Department at University College London (UCL), next door to the College’s Egyptology collection.

After graduating with a degree in Anthropology from UCL, Peter undertook a PhD at the nearby Institute of Archaeology on the study of prehistoric figurines (see Biehl, Chapter 18, in this book). He then returned to the Anthropology Department at UCL in 1962 to organise the teaching of material culture in the undergraduate degree.

Peter owed his first teaching appointment to the broad vision of anthropology held by Professor Daryll Forde, who had been head of department since 1945 (Smith 1969: xv). After completing his own doctorate, Daryll Forde had been awarded a Commonwealth Fellowship in Anthropology for the years 1928–1930 to study at the University of California Berkeley. Here Forde was taught by Robert Lowie and Alfred Kroeber, developing a commitment to the four-field approach characteristic of US anthropology.

By 1960 the undergraduate degree at UCL thus already embraced both social and biological anthropology, and students were registered for a BA or a BSc according to their A-level qualifications. Peter’s appointment made courses on material culture central to the syllabus (previously, lectures on the topic had been delivered in a more ad hoc fashion by various staff and guest lecturers). When Mike Rowlands and Robert Layton began their undergraduate studies in 1963, their degree not only included compulsory courses in archaeology across the road at the Institute of Archaeology but they were also encouraged to attend linguistics lectures at the University’s School of Oriental and African Studies. Here they were introduced to the structural linguistics of Saussure and the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis concerning the relationship between language and thought (Whorf 1956, Saussure 1959).

Throughout Peter’s lectures to first year students runs a sense of respect for non-Western cultures, a willingness to consider other cultures on their own terms, which was later to be translated into political action during Peter’s years in Canberra and Southampton. Robert Layton’s notes on Peter Ucko’s first lecture in his introductory course on Primitive Technology begin:

‘Primitive’ doesn’t imply ‘inferior,’ nor necessarily ‘non-literate’. It means Pre-industrial, that is predominantly for home use.

The terms hunting and gathering, and farming, are exclusive terms, hence inaccurate. Agriculturalists nearly always fish as well, also some tribes may revert from farming to hunting.

Later in the lecture Peter contrasted the theory of ‘the survival of the fittest’ with Tylor’s progressive theory of evolution according to which ‘we find everywhere the relics of stages through which society has passed’. Daryll Forde’s influence is clear in Peter’s observation that the environment imposes problems and provides material for their solution, but it offers a choice to the culture, not compulsory laws; this effect can be seen in variations between cultures inhabiting similar environments.

Peter’s course was memorable for the detailed hand-outs he prepared, illustrated with lucid diagrams, which provided the structure for his lectures that were comprised of discovery and invention, environment and culture, diffusion, cultural parallels and independent invention, skeuomorphs and so on. Peter emphasised the importance of not confusing contemporary variation in artefact form with supposed evolutionary sequences for which there was no material evidence. On the topic of diffusion versus independent invention Layton has noted: ‘If diffusion is assumed, you must also assume diffusion between places that are impossible to link … Arguments for diffusion based on similarities of two cultures are less convincing in detail, e.g. when similar needs of two cultures are considered.’ However, Peter then moved on to well-documented cases of diffusion, such as the spread of tobacco smoking from South America to Europe and then Asia.

‘What is an improvement?’ Peter asks in one lecture, giving the answer: a technique improves if there is less waste. To a people who don’t mind labour, a labour-saving device is not an improvement. England’s (then) refusal to adopt the decimal system was cited as an example of conservatism.

Robert Layton found it particularly interesting to rediscover in his notes a record of Peter’s detailed presentation of Time and Motion Studies as a new way of illuminating the relationship between technology and social organisation. The diffusion of new artefacts or techniques could alter the division of labour. When the US government introduced the wagon to the Papago of Southern Arizona and metal containers replaced pottery, the women had more spare time. Men undertook additional labour to construct the roads for the wagons, but improved transport meant fewer people were required to make a trading journey to exchange grass baskets for grain. The course also looked at Lauriston Sharp’s famous case of the introduction of steel axes to the Australian Yir-yiront (both these examples are from Spicer 1952). Here, no doubt, is the inspiration for the research Layton undertook as part of his PhD on social change in rural France, on the spread of new agricultural techniques, and time and motion studies on their relative effectiveness (eventually published in Layton 2000). At the time, however, the message does not seem to have been absorbed. Peter’s response to Layton’s first essay on material culture exemplifies his unflinching critical standards. The essay, submitted in December 1963, was titled: ‘In what ways can a study of material culture illumine the study of social institutions?’ Layton’s approach is decidedly evolutionist: group size increases as the food supply becomes more secure and society becomes more hierarchical. In the margin of the first page, Peter has scribbled in his inimitable handwriting, ‘What is this all about? The connection with material culture is unclear.’ His final comment is

Most of this is irrelevant. Much of it is factually wrong. Almost all of it is obscurely written. This question was aimed at a consideration of the value of studies isolating individual techniques and material objects (such as Yir-yiront axes) which, combined with time and motion studies, may aid our understanding of social institutions.

Peter Ucko’s equally influential course on ‘Primitive Art’ was introduced as a third year option within the UCL Anthropology degree in 1967. Nine of the students taking the course persuaded Peter to lead members of the student anthropology society on a 10-day expedition to the Palaeolithic caves of the Dordogne in April that year. The total cost per student was 18 pounds, including six pounds in French francs to pay for food and cave entrance fees. Equipped, as instructed, with plenty of old, warm clothing, sleeping bags and tents, and a torch with new batteries, 13 undergraduates and postgraduates set off in a minibus embarrassingly emblazoned ‘Adventure Unlimited’ along the side, while Peter took a parallel course in his car.

Ucko and Rosenfeld’s book Palaeolithic Cave Art (1967) had just been published and Peter took several copies to present to French researchers who had helped with its production. When it appeared, Ucko and Rosenfeld’s study was most notable for its challenge to the structuralist interpretations of Leroi-Gourhan (1958, 1964). As the expedition travelled from cave to cave, however, another interesting research question emerged. Comparing the drawings by the famous French archaeologist Breuil that were reproduced in Palaeolithic Cave Art to the originals showed some startling discrepancies between incomplete and ambiguous figures on the cave wall and Breuil’s confident reconstructions. Out of this realisation grew the Hornos de la Peña rock art project, based in a little-visited cave near the more famous Spanish sites of Castillo and Pasiega, and carried out under Peter’s direction between 1971–1973 (Ucko 1987b, Layton 1991).

The frustration of not knowing anything about the cultural context of Upper Palaeolithic rock art increased Peter’s interest in promoting the study of recent hunter-gatherer rock art, particularly in Australia. He had already been in correspondence with Percy Trezise, a freelance rock art researcher (Trezise 1969), and Fred McCarthy, who was at that time the Principal of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies (Ucko and Rosenfeld 1967: 228–231). In 1972 Peter moved from UCL to succeed McCarthy as Principal of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies in Canberra. It is probably not too extreme to say that this appointment not only changed Peter but also that it changed the way archaeologists and anthropologists studied Aboriginal society. Peter announced his arrival in Australia with a paper declaring that Aboriginal people would have more to tell researchers about their cultures’s rock art than Australian researchers had recognised (Edwards and Ucko 1973; contrast Wright 1973, Maynard 1979). At that time the Institute was a totally white, semi-governmental research organisation whose task was to record, using the time-honoured methods of academic ‘objectivity’, the languages and customs of Aboriginal Australians whose culture was assumed to be dying out. Such an approach failed to take into account the views and concerns of what Peter found to be still-existing Aboriginal communities who had, unsurprisingly, strong views on the value, need and ethics of such research. It is at this point in the story that we hand over to some of the other contributors to pick up particular periods and events in Peter’s later career (Tatz and Lambert, and Golson for Australia; Day and Stone for WAC). However, although the chapters that follow emphasise Peter’s enormous influence, they do not paint a complete picture of his seminal contribution to the study of the past, nor of his personal qualities.

Despite what many might think and say, Peter is actually a rather shy individual. One of us, Peter Stone, well remembers it becoming rather an ‘in-joke’ amongst the taught postgraduate students at Southampton (of which he was one) that the newly appointed Professor of Archaeology was definitely going to meet with his MA students at this or that seminar. Days and then weeks went by and more and more apologies were received as to why he could not make a succession of promised rendezvous. Eventually, after another failed attempt to get Peter to a seminar, it was arranged that he would meet us in the pub. His then Secretary, Sue Stevenson, brought him in, introduced everyone and then left. An obviously extremely nervous Peter retreated into his own territory and individual interrogations began: Who are you? Why are you doing postgraduate work? Why are you doing this MA? What are you going to do afterwards? And then the most telling question – How can I help you? The interrogations revealed two sides to Peter’s character that only appear by implication in the following chapters: He is genuinely interested in people and their education; he wants to ensure everyone gets the most from education by supporting them as much as possible but also by devising and offering an education that is stimulating and challenging.

This interest in education has been a common thread throughout Peter’s career. After he had developed the new courses at UCL mentioned earlier, he ensured that education was a central element of his work in Australia and, on his return to the UK, he completely revised and modified the curricula at both Southampton and the Institute of Archaeology. At Southampton he revolutionised a rather traditional curriculum by introducing large elements of anthropology to the undergraduate degree and encouraging the staff to confront the wider implications of archaeology by taking sabbaticals in, for example, Cameroon (Stephen Shennan), the USA (Tim Champion) and Australia (Clive Gamble). At the Institute of Archaeology, against some resistance, he not only introduced anthropology, theory and public archaeology into the undergraduate curriculum but also took Museum Studies and Conservation beyond a concern with method and technique to a consideration of their social role and the implications that they have for different groups in different societies, as well as starting a whole series of new Masters programmes exploring many different aspects of the relationship between the past and the present. Peter’s ability to encourage and provoke colleagues into developing their own particular specialisms as well as his own contributions to a number of these areas is reflected in the contributions of Peterson, Cleere, Fforde and Hubert, Butler and Rowlands, Jones, MacDonald et al., Biehl, Hassan, and Harris. The range and scope of these contributions and the huge changes in approach or understanding they reflect is a powerful reminder of Peter’s influence over so many varied aspects of our discipline.

In fact, Peter’s interest in how and what aspects of archaeology should be taught at university was immediately provoked on his return to the UK in the early 1980s, when, as head of department at Southampton, he automatically became a member of the British Universities Archaeology Committee (BUAC). The university sector was under enormous pressure from Mrs Thatcher’s Conservative Government, embodied in swingeing cuts imposed by the national University Grants Committee. While Peter did not succeed in carrying through what he thought at the time was a necessary rationalisation of the university discipline at a national level, he did start a debate about the nature of university courses in archaeology that led to the development of the discipline’s teaching, with the acceptance of a common core for courses not necessarily of period and area content but of theory and methodology.

In his work with BUAC Peter argued that it was difficult to see why students should opt to study archaeology at university when the subject was hardly taught in schools. With characteristic zeal, he therefore set about trying to remedy this failing by working with the Joint Matriculation Board to develop an A-Level in Archaeology and also by finding the funding to create the ‘Archaeology and Education Project’ at Southampton. This team, a mixture of archaeologists, teachers and the long-term unemployed, worked with local schools showing how they could use the physical remains of the past that were all around them to enhance their teaching. The team was an enormous success and its work only stopped when government funding was re-targeted. However, its legacy remained as, with customary attention to spreading good practice, Peter had insisted that as much of the team’s work as possible be published – resulting in ten teachers’s handbooks being produced.

If education has been a life-long interest then so equally has been Peter’s insistence that archaeology be seen as a global discipline that actually affects how we live and interact today. This was one of the background assumptions behind the development of the World Archaeological Congress (WAC) at Southampton and has been explicit in, for example, his re-structuring of the curricula in Southampton and London, in the content of the A-Level he developed, in the development of WAC as an organization and in countless initiatives taken since his return to the UK, such as the links brokered between the UK and the Soviet Union and China. This belief in global and comparative archaeology drove Peter to conceptualise, edit and produce the One World Archaeology (OWA) series that has been hailed all over the world as changing the way archaeology is perceived as a discipline. Such an accolade would be enough for many people but it must be remembered that the OWA series is but one of many of Peter’s achievements. A number of contributors reflect Peter’s belief in comparative global archaeology (e.g. Abungu, Marciniak, Politis, Wengrow and Harris) and show how he and WAC have been influential in such developments.

Perhaps the last thread that has woven Peter’s life is his belief that a voice should be given to those affected by the practice of archaeology. This has been epitomised by his insistence that indigenous people with no obvious (i.e. Western) qualification as ‘expert’ be accorded the opportunity to have their voice, their opinion, heard and respected. This insistence has led to numerous confrontations and heated debates, both between archaeologists and indigenous peoples and between factions within archaeology. However, it has also led to a far deeper and ...