The Land of Prehistory

A Critical History of American Archaeology

Alice Beck Kehoe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9780415920544
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134720651
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Historiographie

First published in 1998. The Land of Prehistory reveals the powerful ideological function American archaeology has naively served, from the discipline's construction in Victorian societal reform movements to the present. Alice Beck Kehoe chronicles major movements and influences such as the support of racist Spencerian evolutionism and Manifest Destiny ideologies, and the 1960s New Archaeology pandering to Big Science money. She concludes with a discussion of the recent revolutionary shift to multicultural voices within the field.

Chapter 1
The Construction of the Science of Archaeology

Archaeology as a science, the systematic study of the human past, was constructed in the mid-nineteenth century by men committed to an interpretation of history untrammeled by the authority of texts. “The testimony of things” (Toulmin and Goodfield 1965, 237) would constitute an incontrovertible history untainted by ideology. For well over a century, this transparent mystification of the process of writing history accorded archaeology a powerful status supporting the imperial aspirations of the Western bourgeoisie. The very innocence of things, their enduring presence underneath the winds and storms of politics, carried their mute witness over the suspect claims of conventional authors. Archaeology proferred the Book of Nature, Naturmssensckaft, in place of sectarian dogmas.

Including ancient monuments and other artifacts in natural history presaged the Darwinian worldview placing humans in an embracing natural world. Collingwood—let me introduce him here, the only practicing field archaeologist who was at the same time a first-rate philosopher—locates the formulation of a modern approach to history in the work of Giambattista Vico (1668-1744), specifically in Vico’s formulation of history as research into human societies independent of speculation about divine plan. Collingwood emphasizes (1946, 66) that Vico recognized the study of history rests upon human social experience and arises from the effort to deal with living in society; the practical demands of such experience removes it from the realm of abstruse philosophy. From this common experience, Vico was able to rebut Cartesian denial of ordinary reality and to focus on human agency and its detritus, artifacts. Further, Vico saw oral tradition and documents as artifacts to be examined for their reflection of past states of mind rather than as authority. Vico was not an archaeologist, but his formulation of the field of human history laid the philosophical foundation for the discipline of archaeology.

To pinpoint the appearance of the active side of archaeology is like traipsing through sand. One can celebrate Princess Bel-Shalti-Nannar of Babylon, sixth century B.C., for her collection of antiquities, or the Chinese historian Si־ma Qien, second century B.C., who examined ruins and objects as well as texts (Trigger 1989, 29-30). Collingwood (1946, 58) cited William Camden of England for his survey data, published 1586, parallel to his contemporary Francis Bacon’s advocacy of the scientific method of observations that would later be termed “Baconian science.” My preference is for Edward Lhwyd because he was a professional (cf. Hunter 1975, 191, 214), that is, he earned his living by fieldwork, collections curation, and methodical description as assistant and then Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. Lhwyd exemplified the pursuit of field surveys interpreted through comparisons with both Classical texts and contemporary ethnographies. Lhwyd’s significance, to me, lies particularly in his milieu, the decades of the formal founding of modern science. The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, incorporated 1662 and chartered 1669, embodied quite literally the privileging of knowledge gained through direct and systematic observation (Shapin and Schaffer 1985). A year later, the same king chartered the Company of Adventurers of England Trading Into Hudson’s Bay, similar in signifying royal encouragement of gentlemen actively promoting a daring extension of English power, in one case the power of verified knowledge, in the other the power of economic entrepreneurship.

John Aubrey’s Monumenta Britannica is said to be “the first English book that can be called ‘archaeological’ in the modern sense” (Hunter 1975, 159). Aubrey earns this distinction by questioning the convention of deriving identifications of antiquities through Classical references; instead, he gives primacy to accurate plans and attempts to classify them from attributes in the manner of natural history: “to make the Stones give Evidence for themselves” (quoted in Hunter 1975, 180). Inigo Jones’s Stone-heng Restored (1655) suffers, Aubrey averred, because Jones “framed the monument to his own Hypothesis, which is much differing from the Thing itself’ (quoted in Hunter 1975, 180). Attacks upon the hypothetico-deductive method in archaeology are centuries old.

Aubrey was the first to recognize Avebury as a major component in Britain’s heritage, although Camden had recorded its ditch. Happening to hunt to hounds with other young gentlemen in January 1649, Aubrey was “wonderfully surprized at the sight of these vast stones, of which I had never heard, as also at the mighty Bank and Grasse about it” (quoted in Tylden-Wright 1991, 70). Later, he described this stupendous site to his antiquarian friend Dr. Walter Charleton, who happened to be King’s Physician to Charles II. Chatting with the king in May, 1663, Charleton mentioned Aubrey’s claim that the unknown Avebury was to the famous “Stoneheng as a Cathedral [is to] a Parish church” (quoted in Tylden-Wright 1991, 72). The king requested Aubrey to meet him the next morning, and arranged that he should escort a royal party to the site two weeks later, when the court was journeying to Bath. Charles noticed Silbury Hill and chose to walk up it before rejoining his retinue. At Charles’ solicitation, Aubrey made a plane-table plan of Avebury, but he refused to interpret the construction on the grounds that he had not sufficient firsthand observation of comparable monuments in Wales to derive any generalization. That Avebury, Stonehenge, and the Welsh monuments were pagan temples, probably Druid, was inferred years later after Edward Lhwyd had conducted the requisite survey in Wales (Hunter 1975, 182; Tylden-Wright 1991, 74).

Lhwyd’s salaried position placed him in the ranks of the technicians who carried out much of the work attributed to their aristocratic employers. This hierarchy of knowledge production is as prevalent, and as contestable, in archaeology as in any other science. John Aubrey was born to an independent income but eventually came to depend, like Lhwyd, upon the patronage of wealthy virtuosi. Aubrey’s Monumenta Britannica was never published in spite of the king’s wish that it be—Aubrey lacked money to publish it himself and no patron was sufficiently interested to do so. The fruitful meeting with King Charles came about through Aubrey’s gentleman rank and initial family welfare that enabled him to attend Oxford, where he formed lasting friendships with fellow scholars. In 1663, Aubrey was elected to the Royal Society. Dr. Charleton was a member; so were Robert Hooke, Sir William Petty, Christopher Wren, Robert Boyle, Edmund Hailey, and others who, like the king himself, found the antiquarian a stimulating companion. Aubrey’s position in the gentry enabled him to move in this rank, yet his impecunious condition constrained his explorations (Tylden-Wright 1991, 251) and in attending to patrons’ interests (Hunter 1975, 213), gave him the appearance of a dilettante.

“The Battle of the Ancients and the Moderns” waged on into the eighteenth century (J. M. Levine 1987, 1991), pitting the premise of an ancient Golden Age against that of the persistence of human capabilities. The notion that modern men had the same intellectual capacities as those of Classical times gave those modern men the audacity to ignore or dismiss Classical texts that seemed at odds with observation—if some men today have intellectual capacities comparable to those of the great Ancients, it follows that some Ancients likely had inferior, naive, or perfidious intellects. The Royal Society was a beacon for the Moderns, exhibiting noblemen attending to novel feats of disciplined ingenuity, and presenting their learning in English. The modern mind could explore beyond the world of the Ancients, as navigators and traders were exploring domains outside ancient geographies, and in both spheres, applause hailed the courage to counteract received ideas. Exploration of the past through firsthand examination of its remnants fit this modern license to build knowledge.

Walter Scott, Focal Point of Transition

Among the most intrepid explorers of the past was Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832). Daniel Wilson affirmed:

The zeal for Archaeological investigation which has recently manifested itself in nearly every country of Europe, has been traced, not without reason, to the impulse which proceeded from Abbotsford [Walter Scott’s home]. Though such is not exactly the source which we might expect to give birth to the transition from profitless dilettantism to the intelligent spirit of scientific investigation, yet it is unquestionable that Sir Walter Scott was the first of modern writers uto teach all men this truth, which looks like a truism, and yet was as good as unknown to writers of history and others, till so taught—that the bygone ages of the world were actually filled by living men.” [footnote, Carlyle’s Miscellanies, 2nd Ed. Vol. V:301](Wilson 1851, xi)

Growing up in a classically balanced genteel house in Edinburgh (today appropriately between the School of Scottish Studies and the Department of Archaeology on George Square), Scott was drawn to the hills of the lawless Borders inland from the city.¹ He enjoyed long visits to his grandfather’s farm, where his grandmother recounted to him the valorous deeds of his lineage and sang ballads that the boy precociously transcribed into books. Briefly attending college in his early teens, Scott managed to learn only little Latin and no Greek, instead acquiring a reading knowledge of the modern Romance languages Italian, Spanish, and French. An illness allowed him recuperation in the country, rides and walks of as much as thirty miles, often to examine places of historical significance. These field excursions were balanced by reading, Scott gaining a familiarity with Anglo-Saxon and with Norse sagas, and as a young man, with contemporary German. His collecting of ballads and stories of Border history, including interviews with local elders, continued enthusiastically and distinguished him in his Edinburgh gentlemen’s clubs. By 1802, he published Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, two volumes (a third the next year) of gathered ballads augmented by imitations of his own and friends’ composition. In 1805, his epic Lay of the Last Minstrel was published and sold so well that Scott felt he could give up the practice of law and earn his living principally by writing.

From the extended ballad form he increasingly found tedious, Walter Scott moved to an innovation, the historical novel. Waver ley was published anonymously in 1814, first of the trilogy with Guy Mannering and The Antiquary (both 1815). More Scottish historical novels came out until in 1819 he leaped into Lvanhoe’s more exotic medieval realm. Writing was Scott’s vocation; his avocation was Abbotsford, an accumulation of farms he transformed into an estate with a baronial mansion displaying his antiquarian interests. As in his literary productions, Scott’s Abbotsford drew upon solid firsthand field study of human and artifactual sources, dramatically vivified through his imagination. Contemporaries saw his Scottish novels as romans a clef, arguing over who—out in the Borders, met in Highland excursions, or among themselves in town—were the originals for the telling fictional portraits. (Jonathan Oldbuck, according to Scott himself, was drawn from Scott’s father’s friend George Constable of Wallace Craigie near Dundee. Oldbuck was also Scott himself, a second son trained to the law but enjoying a landed property Monk-barns/Abbots-ford.) The novelist’s lively personifications of historical factors—“Jacobite,” “Royalist,” “Highland chief’—richly set amongst a host of peasants, artisans, wanderers, shepherds, gentry, aristocrats, fisherfolk, beggars, and hawkers are rendered with a generous sauce of Scots dialect, an early salvo in the battle over whether Scots should be recognized as a language or as only a dialect of English. Through his empathetic Scottish characters, his depictions of the landscape, and his commitment to transcribing Scots speech, Walter Scott made his set of Scottish novels part of his compatriots’ resistance to the English dominance threatened through the 1707 Act of Union. Walter Scott winningly displayed the patrimony of the nation, in his ballads and novels for a wide public, and at Abbotsford for a coterie of his own class.

Those admittedly inventive fictions might not have stimulated serious scientific archaeology, were it not for Scott’s lifelong antiquarian activities. The largest of these was his successful petition in 1819 to George IV that the big cannon Mons Meg be returned to Edinburgh Castle from the Tower of London. More mundane was his regular attendance at meetings of antiquarian organizations. There was too little systematic method in their inquiries for these to be judged scientific, but Scott’s research— weighted by his training for the law—was seen as sufficient to invite him to assume the presidency of the Royal Society of Scotland in 1820, the year he was knighted. Scott’s camaraderie lent status and glamor to his fellow antiquarians. His own favorite among his novels, The Antiquary, displays the critical intelligence he brought to the study of Scotland’s past.

The eponymous hero Jonathan Oldbuck is a complex figure. Scott described him as the descendant of a German printer who early in the Reformation immigrated to Scotland and bought a modest estate from a dissipated aristocrat. Jonathan is contrasted with his neighbor Sir Arthur Wardour, scion of an old Scots landed family, “above him in fortune, and beneath him in intellect.” Oldbuck chose as frequent companions only this one of the “country gentlemen,” plus the local doctor and the clergyman. Instead of the fishing and fowling that diverted his neighbors, Oldbuck preferred “correspondence with most of the virtuosi of his time, who, like himself, measured decayed entrenchments, made plans of ruined castles, read illegible inscriptions, and wrote essays on medals in the proportion of twelve pages to each letter of the legend” (W. Scott [1815] 1871, 23).

We observe that the Antiquary deeply respects the more renowned of the virtuosi. Disputing with his one companionable neighbor whether the Piets had been Celtic or Goths, Oldbuck corrects his friend:

“I say the Pikar, Pihar; Piochtar, Piaghter, or Peughtar;” vociferated Oldbuck; “they spoke a Gothic dialect”—

“Genuine Celtic,” again asserverated the knight.

“Gothic! Gothic! I’ll go to death upon it!” counter-asseverated the squire.

“Why, gentlemen,” said Lovel, “I conceive that is a dispute which may be easily settled by philologists, if there are any remains of the language.”

“There is but one word,” said the Baronet, “but, in spite of Mr. Oldbuck’s pertinacity, it is decisive of the question.”

“Yes, in my favour,” said Oldbuck: “Mr. Lovel, you shall be judge—I have the learned Pinkerton on my side.”

“I, on mine, the indefatigable and erudite Chalmers.”

“Gordon comes into my opinion.”

“Sir Robert Sibbald holds mine.”

“Innes is with me!” vociferated Oldbuck.

“Riston has no doubt!” shouted the Baronet. (W. Scott [1815] 1871, 61)

Out in the field, the Antiquary encounters another kind of authority, the grizzled local bard who “had the exterior appearance of a mendicant … one of that privileged class which are called in Scotland the King’s Bedesmen.” Standing in a meadow on his property, Oldbuck had been expounding to young Mr. Lovel the

“tumulus, exhibiting the foundation of ruined buildings—the central point—the prdetorian, doubtless, of the [Roman] camp. From this place, now scarce to be distinguished but by its slight elevation and its greener turf from the rest of the fortification, we may suppose Agricola to have looked forth on the immense army of Caledonians, occupying the declivities of yon opposite hill…….. Yes, my dear friend, … from this very Praetorium”—

A voice from behind interrupted his ecstatic description—”Praetorian here, Praetorian there, I mind the bigging o’t.” …

“What is that you say, Edie?” said Oldbuck, hoping, perhaps that his ears had betrayed their duty—“what were you speaking about?”

“About this bit bourock, your honour,” answered the undaunted Edie; “I mind the bigging o’t.”

“The devil you do! Why, you old fool, it was here before you were born, and will be after you are hanged, man!”

“Hanged or drowned, here or awa, dead or alive, I mind the bigging o’t…. What profit have I for telling ye a lie?—I just ken this about it, that about twenty years syne, I, and a wheen hallenshakers like mysell, and the mason-lads that built the lang dike that gaes down the loaning, and twa or three herds maybe, just set to wark, and built this bit thing here that ye ca’ the—the—Praetorian, and a’ just for a bield at auld Aiken Drum’s bridal….”

“This,” thought Lovel to himself, “is a famous counterpart to the story of Keip on this ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Construction of the Science of Archaeology
• Chapter 2: Science Boldly Predicts
• Chapter 3: Consolidating Prehistory
• Chapter 4: America’s History
• Chapter 5: Positivists of the New Frontier
• Chapter 6: Petrified Puddle Ducks
• Chapter 7: The New Archaeology
• Chapter 8: The Philosophy of the New Archaeology
• Chapter 9: Cahokia: Hidden in Plain Sight
• Chapter 10: Burrowing Through the Chiefdom
• Chapter 11: The Taboo Topic
• Chapter 12: Land of Prehistory
• Endnotes
• References
• Index