Archaeology and Anthropology

Past, Present and Future

David Shankland

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000181623
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Though archaeologists have long acknowledged the work of social anthropologists, anthropologists have been much less eager to repay the compliment. This volume argues that the time has come to recognise the insights archaeological approaches can bring to anthropology. Archaeology's rigorous approach to evidence and material culture; its ability to develop flexible research methodologies; its readiness to work with large-scale models of comparative social change, and to embrace the latest technology all means that it can offer valuable methods that can enrich and enhance current anthropological thinking.Cross-disciplinary and international in scope, this exciting volume draws together cutting-edge essays on the relationship between the two disciplines, arguing for greater collaboration and pointing to new concepts and approaches for anthropology. With contributions from leading scholars, this book will be essential reading for students and scholars of archaeology, anthropology and related disciplines.

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Introduction: Archaeology and Anthropology: Divorce and Partial Reconciliation

David Shankland

Once upon a time, social anthropology and archaeology in the United Kingdom divorced. It is commonly remarked that these days archaeology has begun to welcome social anthropology back into the fold. This is true, as the remarkable essays in Ethnographies of Archaeological Practice, among many others, illustrate (Edgeworth 2006). However, in spite of the partial reconciliation, there is still a rift. This may be seen in a number of ways. The respective methodologies employed by social anthropology and archaeology, their approaches to data, teaching, and dissemination, are all markedly different. The disciplines still maintain their professional and associational existences largely, though not entirely, in isolation from one another.

It is important to stress the difference at the outset. Any attempt to say that the separation is only based on prejudice is quite mistaken. Of course stereotyping may play a part in all human interaction, and relations between archaeology and anthropology are no exception to this rule. I have heard unnecessarily strong skepticism expressed by practitioners of both disciplines about each other. I have myself experienced caustic responses occasionally, particularly when planning modest attempts to look at the fields in tandem. Nevertheless, the divorce is not simply the product of a negative emotional reaction between two otherwise similar parties. The study of how they may differ helps us to understand the intellectual foundations of both subjects and highlights in what way bringing them together again may spark off a creative response. Gosden, for example, has published a thoughtful monograph on this theme (1999), while Hodder has long written on this topic (1982) and in this volume, too, explores key aspects of overlap that may be particularly stimulating to examine in the light of recent developments.

If there is, then, a separation based on genuine differences (however creative these may be) and not only mutual prejudice, when did these come about? Some level of fusion under the general name “anthropology” looks entirely normal at the end of the nineteenth century, when it was routine for those interested in archaeology to be interested in ethnography, and vice versa. One could, for instance, draw on the archaeologists and classicists in the Balkans working from the British School at Athens. Wace, though an archaeologist, wrote with Thompson a work on the Vlachs that is still of importance (Wace and Thompson 1914). Hasluck, whom we look at in more detail later on, wrote extensively on the overlap between Christianity and Islam and on the Bektashis (Hasluck 1929). Anthropologists in their turn were often at home with archaeology. Just before the Great War, the Oxford anthropologist Marett, now unfairly neglected, simply conceived no difference at all between any field of anthropology, writing a beautifully coherent account of a four-field approach in his book entitled Anthropology, published in 1911 and frequently reprinted thereafter.

Yet by the second half of the twentieth century, it was equally usual that a textbook in social anthropology made no mention of archaeology at all. Lienhardt’s erudite Social Anthropology (1964), for instance, which replaces Marett’s, has excised the subject almost entirely. The excellent Social Anthropology in Perspective by I. M. Lewis (1976), rightly deserving its high reputation and perhaps in retrospect written at the apogee of social anthropology, is entirely bereft of archaeology. I say this not at all to belittle works from which I have gained great profit and pleasure: it is simply the case that archaeology did not strike the authors or publishers as being relevant at that time. Likewise, by the end of the twentieth century, social anthropology curricula typically made no attempt to teach archaeology. Even at Cambridge, where undergraduates have until now been taught together in the “Arch and Anth” Faculty in their first year, they appear to separate as quickly as possible into their constituent disciplines thereafter.

Between these two points, when and how did the breakup come about? Was it gradual or sudden? Hann in this volume rightly cautions against using the word revolution, noting that it may obscure as much as it may illuminate. To take the title of the Goody (1995) work on the Malinowskian epoch, Expansive Moment is perhaps a reasonable substitute, permitting us to see what may have coalesced from any earlier anticipatory movements but without denying them. Indeed, something does appear to have crystallized through that Malinowskian moment. After it, skepticism as to the importance of archaeology to anthropology can be found explicitly. Before it, debate appears to be subordinate to those who would prefer unity between fields, as examination of the archives helps to show (Kuklick 1991; see also Stocking 1999).

Of the different Malinowskian impulses that came to shape social anthropology and contribute toward the separation, one of the clearest is the contrast between a single person and a team. There is no overriding reason why the lone fieldworker model should have become an idée fixe of the social anthropology movement. That it became so is indisputable, but it did not have to. The Haddon expedition to the Torres Straits, with its multiple fields of interest and team researchers, was widely held to be a success at the time (Herle and Rouse 1998). It could easily have been replicated, and improved on, regularly throughout the subsequent century. As a matter of course, expeditions of social anthropology could have been devised with specialists, team leaders, data gatherers, data recorders, and analysts. It is true that there may have been, and no doubt still are today, certain circumstances wherein a team could work only with the greatest of difficulty, but the vast proportion of research, if planned and executed properly, could, I suggest, be team based. It is a different kind of field project, one that has its own dynamic and culture, and indeed its own problems and challenges, but there is absolutely nothing that would prevent by definition teamwork from becoming a standard for the discipline, and prevent it from looking at a host of diverse intellectual questions appropriate to social anthropology. There are certain obvious times, the Great Depression, for example, or the period of the economic recession in the early 1990s in Britain, when it would have looked difficult to raise the funding for many such or very large teams, but archaeologists suffer from precisely the same economic cycles and have learned to expand and contract with them.

Single-researcher anthropological fieldwork did, however, become the norm, and arguably helped the discipline’s romantic image at that time, a romance that is still not entirely dissipated. It reflected, too, a philosophical change. Moving toward the single-researcher model facilitated an epistemological transformation that implied that the source of human knowledge comes from the person, not from books. This meant that acquisition of the local language could lead to the fount of knowledge through direct communication with people. Contrariwise, it was no longer necessary to achieve fluency in the high culture of that society: its written records or work written about it, its bureaucracy and administration, its politely arrayed ranks, its architecture, drawing rooms, diplomats, and international statesmen. At a stroke, the whole of the apparatus of centuries of learning about other societies could be put to one side with relief: it simply was no longer necessary to be traditionally learned in order to qualify as an intellectual. Thus, without necessarily doing so consciously, this model of social anthropology had rediscovered the old contrast in monotheistic religions between the lone mystic reaching into the heart of the person to find true knowledge and the teams of scholars agonizing over their superficial rules and texts. Their great feat is that they brought this mystical method, suitably refashioned, into academia and gained acceptance with it.

The orientation of the two disciplines toward time is a third great difference between them, and though in some ways the best known (e.g., Gellner 1995), it nevertheless needs to be rehearsed, because it is so absolutely key to the diverse paths that they have taken. A useful way to conceive this difference is in terms of the causal relationship between the present and the past, for they are precisely opposed. To begin with social anthropology, in the aftermath of the Malinowskian moment (even if his own individual input into this may be debated), an idea coalesced within social anthropology that the past no longer held a causal hold over the future: that, rather, the past could be continuously reinterpreted, rewritten, and reimposed by those who held sway at any given time. It may be said immediately that this idea is neither completely original nor confined to anthropology: George Orwell’s 1984 sketched out precisely how this might be done, after all. What was so remarkable was that an idea that may have occurred independently to several thinkers became ensconced absolutely at the heart of a whole movement. Individual anthropologists might have varied in the way that they interpreted or even needed to articulate this approach, but so long as this emphasis on the present was maintained, even if unwritten, this did not necessarily matter. For example, the prescription “the social must be explained by the social” borrowed from Durkheim sometimes was used as a device in the teaching of social anthropology. This at once had the effect of excluding other approaches (e.g., those that sought a psychological explanation for social behavior as Seligman might have) and also impeded any attempt by history, chronology, or indeed geographical determinism to creep in. The present, with its endless recreating of the social “now,” became the context through which all needed to be approached. This helps to explain the use of the phrase ethnographic present when writing or discussing fieldwork; more than just a tic, as has sometimes been claimed, it actually neatly encapsulated a whole epistemology.

Archaeology, over a slightly longer time frame, moved in exactly the opposite direction (for a good introduction, see Trigger 2006). For just as anthropology was perfecting the idea that ethnography gathered by a single proponent was the ideal way to gather information about this shifting “now,” archaeology was beginning to fine-tune its methodology through the instigation of stratigraphic excavation, which at once facilitated and legitimized the meticulous sifting of data in its temporal context. This inculcation of endless pains in placing all conceivable material evidence in exact relation to all other evidence within a chronological sequence fitted within an archaeological movement that already saw its prime task as to identify the unfolding of human civilizations or societies over time. It facilitated, in turn, the identification of whole cultures with one aspect of their technical attributes, the consequences of which Joyce discusses in this volume. It also demanded an almost infinite expansion of archaeological teams at excavations, because the better the excavation, the more data; the more data, the more they can be analyzed and the more people are necessary to sift, assemble, preserve, and ultimately write about it. In each case, the epistemology suits the practice: social anthropology, regarding the lone researcher as the fount of all knowledge, concentrated ever more intensely on the individual experience of fieldwork; archaeology, exteriorizing the process of discovery, became ever more practiced at handling huge amounts of data.

Archaeology and anthropology, then, did not just divorce. They separated into different lifestyles, which were epistemologically, methodologically, and practically separate. Though both were, in theory, interested in the world’s peoples in global perspective, they even divided geographically. The great archaeological excavations in the classical heartlands of Greece, Anatolia, and the southern Mediterranean continued almost unabated throughout the twentieth century, stopping only for war. This has resulted in some projects lasting almost unbroken for 100 years or more, generations of excavators succeeding each other in turn. In contrast, anthropology—even if it has notable subspecialisms in Oceania and India—could hardly be conceived without a thorough knowledge of sub-Saharan Africa, so that generations of social anthropologists who had not been to that country nevertheless developed what felt like an intimate knowledge of its societies. The early work of Herzfeld in Greece (1987), who in this volume outlines his equally fascinating later researches in Thailand and Rome, famously helped to draw attention to this dichotomy.

It is not surprising, then, that the two sides largely ceased to work with one another. Leach, who enjoyed stating things as clearly as possible, wrote the following as an afterword to an early effort by Spriggs (1977) to bring both sides together (one that included younger academics who were later to become distinguished in their respective fields, including Robert Chapman, Ian Hodder, Roy Ellen, and John Gledhill):

The conference purported to be concerned with the relations between archaeology and social anthropology. In their different ways the various authors all end up by saying that not only does no such relationship exist but that they find it very difficult to envisage how any practically useful cross-examination might develop in the future. Platitudes apart, the implications seem to be wholly negative. (Leach 1977, 161)

Leach’s public declaration of mutual antipathy was hardly helpful, as Thomas discusses in more detail in his most insightful contribution to this volume (see also Garrow and Yarrow 2010). Yet I would argue that there was in addition a process of internal dialogue that helped the two sides to remain distinct and, as it were, pure of each other. Thus, Leach’s pouring cold water on those tentative efforts to bring the two sides together was only the most public, and prominent, form of dissent. In social anthropology, we can see this in the Association of Social Anthropologists (ASA), whose very founding was aimed at distinguishing its members from the earlier, more universal approaches that were current until then. It is striking that even the 2003–2004 Directory of Members of the ASA contains not a single full member whose self-categorization includes any mention of interest in archaeology (ASA 2003, 1–125). The word archaeology is simply banished: not by any formal ruling but by a kind of informal self-cleansing of the recent past from the collective self-representation. It is perhaps this, as much as anything else, that prompted Ingold’s regretful comment in Man: “The history of anthropology in the twentieth century has been one in which these components of the discipline, once combined in nineteenth-century evolutionism, have drifted ever further apart” (1992, 694), ideas that he returns to in his chapter here.

Archaeology in turn, though, did not always find it easy to empathize with the aims of social anthropology. Where what might be called “proto-Malinowski” ideas did emerge from within archaeology, they appear not to have taken root. In other words, diverging approaches or conclusions by individual researchers did not necessarily alter established disciplinary practices. This strikingly Kuhnian pattern, whereby anomalies are carefully ignored as long as possible, makes one realize just how Malinowski was facilitated by coming from outside. In doing so, he was restrained by no long-standing social ties and hardly respectful of those to whom he might have felt obligated. Innovators from within, by contrast, have to be unscrupulous twice over to succeed: they have to overcome the prevailing intellectual ethos and at the same time avoid appearing as troublemakers to those who have helped them take th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Introduction: Archaeology and Anthropology: Divorce and Partial Reconciliation
• 2 Big Revolutions, Two Small Disciplines, and Socialism
• 3 Whose Rights to Which Past? Archaeologists, Anthropologists, and the Ethics of Heritage in the Global Hierarchy of Value
• 4 Archaeology and Anthropology: The State of the Relationship
• 5 No More Ancient; No More Human: The Future Past of Archaeology and Anthropology
• 6 Sacred Architecture: Archaeological and Anthropological Perspectives
• 7 Life with Things: Archaeology and Materiality
• 8 Archaeological Ethnography: Materiality, Heritage, and Hybrid Methodologies
• 9 The Anthropological Imagination and British Iron Age Society
• 10 Space, Place, and Architecture: A Major Meeting Point between Social Archaeology and Anthropology?
• 11 Encountering the Past: Unearthing Remnants of Humans in Archaeology and Anthropology
• 12 Archaeology, Anthropology, and Material Things
• Index