Re-constructing Archaeology

Theory and Practice

Michael Shanks, Christopher Tilley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781134886098
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

InRe-Constructing Archaeology, Shanks and Tilley aim to challenge the disciplinary practices of both traditional and the `new' archaeology and to present a radical alternative - a critically self-consious archaeology aware of itself as pracitce in the present, and equally a social archaeology that appreciates artefacts not merely as ovjects of analysis but as part of a social world of past and present that is charged with meaning. It is a fresh and invigorating contribution to the emergence of a philosophically and politically informed archaeology.

PART 1
Issues in archaeological theory and practice: critique and development

1
The present past

Introduction

The past (which others may call the museum, the archive, the library) recedes in an indefinite, perhaps infinite series of galleries. Archaeologists wander the winding and seemingly endless corridors, forever unlocking doors which appear new, armed with different analytical keys, picking over the skeletal remnants of past societies, scrutinizing shelves of death or gathering 'truths' from self-referencing site reports. The archaeologist is devoted to the embalmed relics deafeningly silent yet sacred in their meaninglessness, devoted to the preserved past. The past is a mystery and theories abound as to its meaning, its construction, its constructors. In their antiquarian amnesia and isolation (isolation in the midst of all the human debris), some frantically unlock door after door, compiling an infinite inventory of facts, self-evident truths. Others seek to map the labyrinthine floor plan, illuminating the corridors with the lengthening shadows of the present. But are there new doors? new facts? new truths? Is there a way through the maze of the past? Or has the archaeologist been condemned to eternal mythical repetition of the present, to forgetfulness? The solution is to demolish the museum, but destruktion, not zerstörung; the task is to dismantle the great metaphysical and rhetorical structure, the architecture of discourse erected in the name of a conserved past, not in order to smash and discard the contents, but in order to rescue them, reinscribe their meaning.

Time is central to archaeology. It constitutes the major problem of interpretation and yet is the reason for the discipline's existence. By definition the past cannot be present and yet the traces of the past surround us. The past is both completed and still living. But in concentrating on the time of the past the time of archaeology tends to be forgotten, i.e. archaeology as social practice and personal experience which takes up people's time in the present.

In this chapter we consider the nature of time as an abstract concept. Time is not just something manifested in C-14 chronology or publication dates. We argue that it is not simply a neutral device with which to analyse the past and discuss the nature of archaeology as an active relation with the past. Archaeologists spend their time (the metaphor is not incidental to what we have to say) producing a past in the present. They survey and excavate and eventually write for an audience. We examine the nature of what archaeologists do and produce and how they justify their activities. We attempt to emphasize archaeology as event and experience in the present, as social practice which cannot escape the present.

The intention is not to sacrifice objectivity and replace it with an extreme and disabling relativism with archaeologists locked into the present. In the works that archaeologists write there can be no simple choice between fictional creations and objective copies of the past. We confront the conventional opposition between subjectivity and objectivity and argue that there is a need to move beyond it. Our aim is to investigate the nature of current fissures in archaeological theory and practice and relate them to their origin in a problematic present.

The problematic past

The present's relation with the past is no longer self-evident. Past and present are separated by a chasm of misunderstanding. A need has been perceived for a special field of activity, for a class of experts or professionals, to deal with the problems the traces of the past pose to the present. The basic problems are:

• (1) how to observe the traces of the past objectively;
• (2) how to bridge the distance between the traces in the present and their social origin in the past;
• (3) what to do about the destruction and disappearance of the traces of the past;
• (4) why these problems are worth posing and considering anyway.

There is a consensus in archaeology as to how to observe the traces the past has left behind - by means of survey and excavation, detailed 'scientific' examination. This aspect of the practice of archaeology aims at producing high-quality information (the sceptical and practical empiricist would forbid us to term it 'objective'). It aims at filtering out the 'noise' of subjective experience - the rainy days and the wandering cows. The problems involved at this level are the practical problems of obtaining and managing a 'skilled' workforce, of producing an intelligible site report. The result is the 'objectivity' of the C-14 date (Binford 1982, pp. 134-5), of the accurately observed and drawn site plan or section.

There is much less agreement about the route from present to past and what is there at the end of the journey, about the interpretation or explanation of the archaeological record. Argument has raged for at least the past twenty years as to what archaeology should be - an historical discipline producing a description of what happened in the past, a science of human behaviour, a science of 'culture process' or a science of the traces of the past themselves in the archaeological record. Concern has also been focussed on ideological distortion of the past for present purposes.

The traces of the past are disappearing in the present, excavated away in one way or another at an alarmingly rapid rate. What is to be done? Under a consensus in academia and among others enlightened by a 'conservation ethic' there is a belief that it is right to preserve the past. The problem is largely seen as an administrative one involving planning procedures, legislation and funding. It is also to a certain extent an educational problem of inculcating and marketing the conservation ethic, respect for the past.

There has been little concern with justifications for archaeology, little serious questioning of the basic reasons for doing archaeology. With notable exceptions the concern has mainly expressed itself as rhetorical gesture, justification after the act, afterthought.

We shall consider each of these problems, beginning first with that of bridging the distance between the past and present.

Time travel: getting from the present back to the past

Topological thinking

Topological thinking, which knows the place of every phenomenon and the essence of none, is secretly related to the paranoic system of delusions which is cut off from experience of the object. With the aid of mechanically functioning categories, the world is divided into black and white and thus made ready for the very domination against which concepts were once conceived.

(Adorno 1967, p. 33)

The past is over, completed, and so much ol it is lost in the distance. There are still traces with us; the problem is how to use these to enable us to see the past, to visit the distant past. The traces of the past which we find in the present 'belong' to time other than the present. The problem is how to relate to this otherness. The traces belong to a time in the distance which we cannot see clearly. In this way time is conceived spatially, as distance. Spatial time is at the centre of the problematic past. We shall consider its characteristics and its relation to problems of interpreting the past.

The past is conceived as completed. It is in grammatical terms 'perfect', a present state resulting from an action or event in the past which is over and done. This 'perfected' past is opposed to the flow of the ongoing, incompleted, 'imperfect' present. Although the past is completed and gone, it is nevertheless physically present with us in its material traces. But the attribution of the traces to a 'perfect' past, distant from the present, brings ambiguity, the problem.

A 'perfect' past does not imply a mode of presence with an investigating archaeologist, but one of absence. The past is temporally absent, belonging to another time. A 'perfect' past is an 'allochronic' past (Fabian 1983). In such a conception the past is absent not as the contrary of physical presence - the objects of the past are here with us now - but as the contrary of the continuous 'imperfect' present, which is a process, a continuing, incomplete state.

The spatial temporality of objects locked in a 'perfect' past, an evanescent moment of time, implies a mode of possession. The object belongs to the past; time possesses the object locked into its present, its moment in the ceaseless flow. 'The object has been, it has happened': the perfect tense itself hints at this mode of possession. Time reduced to spatial distance is simply a system of spatial coordinates - literally a fourth dimension according to which a potentially infinite number of uneventful data may be recorded. The time of an object becomes a property possessed, equivalent to mass and dimension. The object is conceived as an empty container. Its coordinate in time, location in empty spatial time, is one of its possessed properties, contingent, accidental. In Latin it is subiectum possessing accidentes (see the discussion in Heidegger 1978, pp. 153ff., and in Rose 1984, pp. 62-3).

So the past becomes contingent; our relation to the past becomes accidental and mysterious. The past is gone, distant, and so a mystery, a problem presenting a challenge to penetrate through the dust and debris to find the way back, to see what is hidden in the distance. But the distance, the other-ness, the absence of the past is postulated as a condition of the challenge. It is this which obscures. Inquiry becomes topological thinking, setting the traces of the past in their place, in the distance. The material traces of the past are ordered, classified, presented with identification papers and locked up. The past becomes a vast labyrinthine edifice to be inhabited. The archaeologist wanders the corridors weighed down with keys, administrating, surveilling, dominating.

Commodified time

The quickest runner can never overtake the slowest, since the pursuer must first reach the point from where the pursued started, so that the slowest must always hold a lead.

(Zeno in Aristotle, Physics Z9 239b15)

Zeno's paradox of Achilles and the tortoise depends on an infinitely divisible time; it is a time composed of an infinity of durationless moments. But the point is not that Achilles can never overtake the tortoise, but that this is inscribed into the nature of the race itself and who organized and fixed it - ancestors of the anonymous factory timekeeper.

Spatial time is uniform, abstract and commodified time, the time of capitalist production, the time of Zeno's race. It is in essence the abstraction of irreversible time, all of whose segments must prove on the chronometer their merely quantitative equality. In reality the nature of this time is simply its exchangeable character: measured empty duration, separate from the content(s) of existence that fill it up, freely exchangeable with all other time

Such abstract clock-time allows the exchange of labour and its product; commodified time is the link between the commodity form of goods and commodified labour. 'The calculation and coordination of exchange values by labour time is a specific feature of the commodification of economic relations introduced by the convergence of money capital and the formation of wage labour characteristic of capitalism' (Giddens 1981, p. 119). Capitalism depends on spatial, commodified time.

Empty commodified time applies to all events. All events are comparable according to such time which maintains that a pot and the spread of farming belong to the same calculus, a calculus which is indifferent to them both (cf. Berger 1984, pp. 9-10). The past disintegrates when the meaning of an object or event lies in its assignation to a point in time. Such assignation occurs at the cost of the integrity of our experience of the past. It amounts to a loss of memory, a betrayal of the past which is forgotten. As a sequence of 'nows' history exists separately from people. It loses its specificity, its coherence and it becomes a problem; hence the paradox of Zeno's race.

Yet such a history or conception of the past also forms a continuum, a seemingly organic whole:

The exchange of commodities is at once smoothly continuous and an infinity of interruption: since each gesture of exchange is an exact repetition of the previous one, there can be no connection between them. It is for this reason that the time of the commodity is at once empty and homogeneous: its homogeneity is, precisely, the infinite self-identity of a pure recurrence which, since it has no power to modify, has no more body than a mirror image. What binds history into plenitude is the exact symmetry of its repeated absences. It is because its non-happenings always happen in exactly the same way that it forms such an organic whole

(Eagleton 1981, p. 29)

This continuous whole forms the basis of some populist work which claims that archaeology is in the process of discovering 'our' history, 'our' past or the past of the whole of humanity. Such a viewpoint does not take into account the qualitative historical moment of conflict, rupture or discontinuity. It is unable to comprehend the notion of qualitatively different archaeologies, archaeologies other than those written by middleclass white western males (cf. Hodder 1984, pp. 30-1). Individuals, interest groups, and societies all have different perspectives on the past. There is and can be no monolithic undifferentiated PAST. Rather, there are multiple and competing pasts made in accordance with ethnic, cultural and gender political orientations (see Hall 1984; Ucko 1983; Conkey and Spector 1984).

Commodified time entails that our consciousness is itself set in time like any other phenomenon. It cannot deal with subjective experience. Objective time is separated from the subjective individual, analogously work is separated from leisure. The work of the archaeologist cannot be related to his or her subjective experience of doing archaeology. Commodified time implies the abolition of that time created by the event of consciousness - human practice, the flow of actions in and on the world in individualized time.

The archaeologist is an Achilles chasing a past which seems so easy to reach and yet they never quite get there. Commodified time is the unexamined premise of so much archaeological work. It lies behind the allochronism of archaeology - the assignation of the objects and the traces of the past to another and always distant time. This breaks the relation between past and present, destroying the integrity of experience of the past. Questions of investigation and preservation of the past become apparently unanswerable. Problem orientation or general recovery? What should be recovered and why? There can be no coherent consideration of these questions, only rhetorical appeals to accepted values, to pluralism or expert consensus, or a resignation to scepticism. Commodification of time denies the historicity of archaeological work itself, its place in contemporary society, the present's production of the past.

Commodified time forms a premise of traditional typological work involving the assumption that the temporal classification of an artifact somehow provides a clue to its meaning, that empty time itself explains (see Chapter 7, pp. 138-9). It also produces an homogeneous history, permitting the equal treatment of culture at all times and places - comparative method. It allows general classificatory stages to be developed in which different societies are shunted into evolutionary sequences. Qualitative substantial time which recognizes difference is replaced by quantitative classificatory time. All 'tribes' are considered to be equivalent and hierarchically placed in relation to 'chiefdoms' or 'bands' or 'states'.

The role of the archaeologist

What is the relation between the archaeologist and the artifact? What is the role of the archaeologist in reconstituting the past by means of the artifact and other traces of the past? What is the role of the archaeologist in the time travel, in overcoming the distance between past and present? The answers to these questions, answers implicit in the theoretical affiliations of archaeologists, are conditioned by the distance, the gap between subject and object, past and present being always-already a problem.

Science may be asserted as the means of getting back to the past. The archaeologist is to construct a vehicle which is to get to the past on its own. The vehicle is science. Subjectivity is to be eliminated; it is to adapt itself to the objective.

On the other hand the implications of subjectivity may be recognized. Scepticism and its doctrinal embodiment relativism maintain that subjectivity just has to be accepted; there can be no completely objective account of the past. The 'truth' of the past can never be known for certain; objects are locked into their time, archaeologists into theirs. Archaeologists can draw increasingly close, but never quite get there because of subjectivity, belonging to the present. (See for example Daniel 1962, p. 165 and Fowler 1977, p. 138. See also the discussion below on archaeology as ideology.)

Wheeler (1954, pp. 17-18 and chapter 17), Hawkes (1968) and others have asserted the positive value of subjectivity, the humanities-trained archaeologist, the imaginative individual breaking with the ties of the present to feel the way back to the past. So the role of the archaeologist is one of empathy, breathing life into the dusty relics, inspiration, imaginative reconstruction, affective affinity. Archaeology becomes a personal confrontation with the past; ultimately it is based on a longing for a dialogue with th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Figures
• Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Preface to the second edition
• Introduction
• PART I ISSUES IN ARCHAEOLOGICAL THEORY AND PRACTICE: CRITIQUE AND DEVELOPMENT
• PART II PERSPECTIVES FOR A SOCIAL ARCHAEOLOGY
• PART III MATERIAL CULTURE AND SOCIAL PRACTICES
• PART IV CONCLUSIONS
• Appendix: Archaeology into the 1990s
• References
• Index