Familiar Past?

Archaeologies of Later Historical Britain

Sarah Tarlow, Susie West

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN:
  9780415188050
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134660346
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: Social Sciences

The Familiar Past surveys material culture from 1500 to the present day. Fourteen case studies, grouped under related topics, include discussion of issues such as:
* the origins of modernity in urban contexts
* the historical anthropology of food
* the social and spatial construction of country houses
* the social history of a workhouse site
* changes in memorial forms and inscriptions
* the archaeological treatment of gardens.
The Familiar Past has been structured as a teaching text and will be useful to students of history and archaeology.

1
INTRODUCTION

Susie West

While we reject empathetic responses, the experience of engaging with the past as archaeologists is intimately bound up with the impact that sites and artefacts make through their resonances of past activities and past minds. A past populated with individuals becomes ‘alive’, and this (indirect) contact is one of the rewards and motivations of research. Arguably, it is this sense of contact with the past that has been lacking in British post-medieval archaeology. Post-medieval archaeology in Britain is conventionally held to start after 1500 or 1550, and in practice ceases by 1750 to judge by the lack of published work going beyond that date. Post-medieval archaeology does not have a flourishing image as a research area, and can be unfavourably contrasted with intellectual explorations in prehistoric archaeology. Years of data collection have not been illuminated by questions centred on people. Modern archaeology has evolved through a vigorous period of reassessments of the purpose and methods of the discipline since the 1960s, and is now aligned with other human behaviour disciplines such as anthropology and sociology. The reasons for post-medieval archaeology’s lack of involvement with the general disciplinary evolution of archaeology are not clear, but there is some evidence that one specific definition of the practice of archaeology has acquired a longer life within the community of post-medieval researchers than elsewhere. The fundamental questions that define the existence of our discipline deserve consideration in this community. Why, and how, do we do archaeology?

Archaeology, as the study of the physical remains of the human past, includes the nineteenth-century workhouse as well as the Bronze Age burial mound; the country house as well as the stone axe. If prehistoric archaeology is about making the unknown more familiar, the archaeology of historic periods is often about de-familiarizing what we think is the known past. The recent past surrounds us, observable daily through standing buildings and the cumulative alterations to the landscape. Yet we live with the results of cumulative actions, phases of creation and alteration which have their own historically specific contexts, possibly founded on quite different assumptions about society and human behaviour. Archaeology, as a discipline concerned with material culture, has a valuable contribution to make to current debates about the more recent past. These debates include, amongst others, issues of consumption and appropriation, changing social and political ideologies and the creation of modern identities.

This volume is the result of the editors’ interest in taking up the challenges that American historical archaeology offers to British post-medieval archaeology, already expressed through such work as Johnson 1996. Historical archaeology in the United States has become increasingly better known in British archaeological circles, through the work of prominent authors such as James Deetz and Henry Glassie, and through urban archaeology projects which are of necessity focused on recent centuries. British practice can draw on the innovations and successes of American historical archaeology in producing theoretically informed and inclusive accounts of the recent past. There is still a lack of British published work dealing with post-medieval archaeology in the form of research-driven projects, although individual scholars are producing innovative work (e.g. Johnson 1993 and 1996; Williamson 1995). Much published post-medieval archaeology does not rise to the interpretative challenges that are posed by a social archaeology able to consider social identities and multiple meanings. It is clear that British post-medieval archaeology is in danger of trailing behind other areas of work which do have something to say about communities and ways of living. What have we most to gain from adopting American modes of producing historical archaeology? How do British traditions help us develop a new formulation of the recent past?

An examination of the production of post-medieval and historical archaeology in Britain and America can demonstrate structural questions arising from different histories of the discipline. Problems in British post-medieval archaeology can be identified and confronted by another look at the nature of the modern discipline. One of the main issues is the naming of the subject, and brings into question the now traditional periodization of post-medieval archaeology as being sometime after 1500 and possibly ceasing by 1750. These dates may no longer be relevant to an understanding of the process of becoming a modern society. Above all, the argument must be made for producing research about the recent material past that contributes to the wider archaeological project of understanding human behaviour through action in the material world.

ON BEING OVER-FAMILIAR

Our starting point is that the recent past is perhaps not as ‘familiar’ to us as its apparent accessibility through diaries, novels, plays, music, gardens, villages, antique shops, costume dramas or television adverts suggests. Precisely because the products of the recent past have a high survival rate around us, our own daily practices may rework and reassign new, contemporary meanings to the material culture that survives from quite different social origins (think of the appeal of the thatched country cottage for holiday homes now, compared to the grim reality of the poverty they housed). Villages and towns have modern shopfronts inserted into centuries-old buildings; post-industrial capitalism continues to have massive impact on our physical surroundings as industrial sites are abandoned and retail centres spring up in out-of-town green-field sites. Our material world is always changing: as our immediate surroundings evolve, so do our interpretations of them. Urban spaces might seem to become more threatening or more accessible; countryside dominated by agribusiness and light industry becomes more economic but less ecological; medieval churches acquire central altars and loo blocks, becoming more relevant to modern times or destroyers of tradition? This is not an argument about the meaning of ‘progress’, but about the presence of change in superficially immutable places.

People change too. Empathy with previous generations is encouraged through the availability of sources that offer direct voices from the past, but we are not ‘just like they were’. The social construction of identities evolves over time and space, as individual people experience new factors in their relationships with their interior life, their kin, work relations, leisure time; new political opportunities emerge with the franchise; economic gains and losses are experienced. Individuals in the past, however attractive to the present observer, always retain their historically specific context, and therefore their understandings of their world will not be ours. ‘Familiar’ people and places in the past can instead point up the differences between now and then, and in doing so may add to our understanding of now. Arguably, historical archaeology has more to offer than the distant prehistoric past to the project of exploring what it is to be human. Its potential is manifest in the richness and diversity of sources available and through its immediacy in present experiences.

THE IDENTITY OF ARCHAEOLOGY

British archaeology has developed as a broad and varied discipline. Data retrieval and classification developed in the nineteenth century have provided the foundations and hallmark methods of the discipline. However, archaeology is not just concerned with digging up the past. At its innovative best, it has the ability to explore ‘social and material practices – what people do, the way they do it, the meanings they attach to what they do’ (Johnson 1996: 1–2). The assumption that material culture carries meanings beyond the obviously functional is widely established across disciplines such as archaeology, anthropology, history, art and architectural history, psychology and sociology. An archaeological approach to material culture prioritizes the material results of human action in context, in order to gain information from the location and placement of artefacts, structures and features in relation to each other. An artefact taken from its site without any record loses most of its archaeological value.

The material evidence for social practices is derived chiefly from things people construct, own, modify and discard: their own bodies (in life through clothes, tattoos, piercing, and in death through burial practices), their animals and plants, objects (including texts), buildings and landscapes. The debate discussed here does not concern best practice in extracting data, but rather is about the identification and interpretation of the different levels of meaning which are to be discerned in material culture.

Changing attitudes to standards of explanation and interpretation within the discipline are often outlined in accounts of the development of archaeology through the identification of major theoretical schools which are concerned to use material culture to define and explain human behaviour (see for example Renfrew and Bahn 1996; Trigger 1989). In parallel with other disciplines, there has been a movement away from an empirical, narrative-based mode of research, through diversification in the 1960s, drawing on developments in computer science, the history of science and the perceived need for general explanations of human behaviour. First known as the New Archaeology, processual archaeology gained its name through its emphasis on understanding the processes involved in systems of human activities. Such systemic accounts have tended to prioritize functional, adaptive explanations of human choices. Pioneers such as Lewis Binford developed the links between archaeology and ethnography in order to research prehistoric cultures through parallel surviving cultures.

Traditional and processual archaeologies have not produced explicitly political agendas. Archaeology does encompass various explicitly political philosophies, chiefly Marxism and feminism, which themselves cover a range of formulations and aim to produce archaeologies of all social groups. A counter-movement to processual archaeology became prominent in the 1980s, known as post-processualism, reacting against processualism’s attempts to produce general statements about human behaviour from functionalist analyses and the absence of imaginative ways of discussing the role of symbolism and abstract meanings in material culture. Again, post-processualism included a broad range of philosophical standpoints, and may be compared to the rise of post-modernism in literary theory.

The chapters in this volume are all influenced by the social, contextual archaeology that has evolved from debates between the schools in the 1980s. Contextual archaeology prioritizes the need to consider material evidence within a web of relationships, or contexts, that are historically specific. It defines material culture as ‘active’: physical surroundings are seen as imbued with symbolic meanings which shape actions (giving cues about how to behave, belonging to a social group, being welcome or in the wrong place, etc.). Furthermore, the socially constructed meanings can evolve with society, without changing their physical attributes. There is therefore a constant exchange or a ‘reflexive’ relationship involved in the human experience of the physical world (Shanks and Tilley 1987 and 1994).

The approaches exemplified in this volume can be contrasted with a body of work in Britain: traditionalist archaeology, seemingly untouched by any theoretical school of archaeology. This approach rejects or ignores explicit theorization, preferring to track cultural change without reference to social processes, through classification and description. Traditionalist archaeology does not recognize that material culture is active in being created by, and shaping, human action. Processual archaeology has been criticized for failing to address this possibility also, but it certainly recognizes that material culture involves human action in the form of selected choices, albeit that such choices are understood as functional and adaptive. David Clarke, pioneer of British New Archaeology, has characterized traditionalist archaeology as historical, qualitative, particularizing, literary, narrative, isolationist and authoritarian (Clarke 1972: 54). The historical philosophy of traditionalist archaeology comes from its relationship with Whig– Liberal historiography, the dominant form of historical framework perhaps as late as the 1960s in Britain. Untouched by subsequent developments in social history and cultural anthropology, traditionalist historic and prehistoric accounts attempt to create Whiggish narratives of cultural change, driven by teleological appeals to political change, i.e. prioritizing an inbuilt drive towards political outcomes.

This definition is not intended to undermine the quality of the data that traditionalists produce and work with. A glance over the relevant national period journals and local multi-period journals indicates the quantity of such research. Norfolk Archaeology, the journal of Norfolk archaeology and local history, celebrated 150 years of its society’s existence last year (1996). In the past thirteen years it published 127 major papers and shorter notices. Of these, some twenty-seven concerned post-medieval material culture (after 1500 AD) using artefactual and site evidence, while post-medieval documentary studies (often of individuals or institutions) comprised a further nineteen. This is a very encouraging proportion of research, but the sample falls into narrow categories. Six of the twenty-seven papers concerned buildings, all except one now demolished, ruined or disused, and all with early sixteenth-century origins or earlier. Most of the twenty-seven papers focused on the seventeenth century. Developments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries only appeared as brief episodes at the end of accounts of these building histories. The research questions behind the papers were predominantly concerned with establishing chronologies, ownership, occupation, function and typological significance, rather than with any explicit discussion of the relationship of the case study to wider research frameworks. The output of such a journal is a real mine of data, but such narrative case studies sit within a theoretical, and therefore interpretative, vacuum.

DEFINING ARCHAEOLOGICAL DATA

In order to understand why British post-medieval archaeology has been dominated by adherents of no explicit theoretical school, we can suggest that the traditionalists’ definition of the discipline must be formulated in a way that is no longer shared by other communities of archaeological scholars. The foundation methods of the discipline (data collection and classification) if taken as an end in themselves can be seen to have a profound effect on the type of cultural products that are considered appropriate to study. It is equally the case that certain classes of data receive more or less attention according to the theoretical perspective of the researcher. For example, prehistoric house sites have received little attention from processual archaeologists, since the microscale of domestic activities has been considered as less important and detached from the macroscale problems of regional socio-economic organization (e.g. settlement patterns, trade and exchange) (Tringham 1991: 99). In contrast Marxist and feminist approaches can prioritize this: ‘the analysis of social change at a microscale has long been recognised as an essential scale for the study of social relations of production, including gender relations, especially in non-capitalist or pre-capitalist social formations’ (ibid.). Thus the analysis of house sites in the context of social change has been enabled by post-processual or contextual archaeologists. However, certain questions may not only be irrelevant to the central theoretical problems of one perspective. They may also appear to be more easily researched through other sources, usually texts, and be rejected for study on this ground alone.

To judge from the bulk of work dealing with the period after 1500, traditionalist archaeology survives in Britain particularly within the framework of post-medieval archaeology. Traditionalist questions are limited to low-level data compilation issues of how many, where, and what forms a given product takes. The cataloguing of medieval pottery is found to be appropriate for the discipline because of the lack of other sources for that information. Research into eighteenth-century factory porcelain can be rejected, because of the availability of written records and their assumed potential for answering the low-level questions (Anon. 1967: 1). Higher-level questions, concerning the meanings assigned to the pottery, may therefore be rejected in this formulation of the discipline as either impossible to answer with satisfactory proof or as lying within the province of social history. In other words, traditionalist archaeology implies a restrictive definition of what is correct and appropriate knowledge for archaeology. This results in the ontological problematization of archaeological knowledge within a recent historic period. Our contention is that this limited notion of archaeological research is inevitable if a conception of archaeology as concerned with collecting and classifying data within an outdated historical framework persists. In contrast, the adoption of an anthropological formulation of archaeology makes this particular search for ‘correct’ knowledge redundant.

The link between traditionalist and post-medieval archaeology is not exclusive. British archaeological research in historic periods after 1500 is being produced with social theory in mind, and has been influenced chiefly by American studies in historical archaeology. The ‘new wave’ of historical archaeologists in Britain is only just visible in the literature, but is becoming established through recent conferences (chiefly through the annual Theoretical Archaeology Group conference, the biggest research forum for British archaeology). Several new questions arise from this development: the relevance of American post-Columbian, colonial agendas, the relationship of archaeology to histories of the modern world, and the relevance of American treatments of archaeology as anthropology to British archaeology. In particular, what should British archaeology for the periods after 1500 call itself?

ARCHAEOLOGY IN HISTORIC PERIODS: THE RISE OF THE MODERN WORLD

Current American historical archaeology has its own specific historical trajectory. The excavation of colonial settlements in the USA and subsequent archaeological analysis have provoked debate since 1910 over the place of historical archaeology: as the handmaid to history (filling in textual gaps) or as anthropology (producing interpretations in its own right). Unlike in Britain, prehistoric archaeology has always been classified as deriving from anthropology. Historical archaeology, defined as a subfield of history by some early American practitioners, was initially proposed as a useful data provider, filling in gaps in the written record and locating known historical sites such as houses of prominent named settlers. Until developments in dating and designing questions of artefacts showed that American archaeologists could ask different questions from those asked by historians and get answers from material culture products it was in danger of appearing as a retrieval technique for antique collectors (Binford 1978; South 1978).

American historical archaeology is now firmly placed within the anthropological project of the exploration of the rise of the modern world. This general project itself evolved from a multi-disciplinary research expansion from the 1970s (Schuyler 1978: 252). In contrast, British archaeologists do not have a tradition of working within anthropology, and have preferred to treat archaeology as a separate discipline, albeit one that is closely related to anthropology. The potential place of historical archaeology in Britain is however exemplified by the place that American practice has shown can be found within an expanding discipline. Central archaeological concerns such as ethnicity, gender, kinship, the character of social relations of production or the meaning and transmission of style are all anthropological questions. They are more familiar to a British audience from research in prehistoric contexts, but are now found within historical archaeology. In the past quarter of a century, such questions have developed out of the exploration of the processes of change in human societies past and present, through material culture as the expres...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• THE FAMILIAR PAST?
• FIGURES
• TABLES
• CONTRIBUTORS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• 1: INTRODUCTION
• PART I: THE FAMILIAR PAST?
• PART II: FAMILIAR SPACES
• PART III: BREEDING CONTEMPT
• PART IV: FAMILIAR SPIRITS
• PART V: OLD FAMILIAR PLACES
• PART VI: AFTERWORDS ACROSS THE ATLANTIC