Time, Process and Structured Transformation in Archaeology
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Time, Process and Structured Transformation in Archaeology

James McGlade, Sander E. van der Leeuw, James McGlade, Sander E. van der Leeuw

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eBook - ePub

Time, Process and Structured Transformation in Archaeology

James McGlade, Sander E. van der Leeuw, James McGlade, Sander E. van der Leeuw

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About This Book

In a discipline which essentially studies how modern man came to be, it is remarkable that there are hardly any conceptual tools to describe change. This is due to the history of the western intellectual and scientific tradition, which for a long time favoured mechanics over dynamics, and the study of stability over that of change. Change was primarily deemed due to external events (in archaeology mainly climatic or 'environmental').
Revolutionary innovations in the natural and life sciences, often (erroneously) referred to as 'chaos theory', suggest that there are ways to overcome this problem. A wide range of processes can be described in terms of dynamic systems, and modern computing methods enable us to investigate many of their properties. This volume presents a cogent argument for the use of such approaches, and a discussion of a number of its aspects by a range of scientists from the humanities, social and natural sciences, and archaeology.

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Information

Publisher
Routledge
Year
2013
ISBN
9781134525027
Subtopic
Archaeology
Edition
1

1

Introduction: Archaeology and non-linear dynamics – new approaches to long-term change

JAMES MCGLADE AND SANDER E. VAN DER LEEUW
Social evolution is not continuous, nor linear, and cannot be reduced to a general tendency to growing differentiation, complexity and flexibility (Touraine 1977, p. 5).
Introduction
In the last twenty years archaeology has changed fundamentally. What probably strikes the interested lay reader most is the enormous quantity of data which have been obtained through punctilious and systematic fieldwork, and the continued integration between the discipline and a wide range of others, from the natural sciences through the social sciences to the humanities. Physics and chemistry (radiometric dating, dietary reconstruction through trace-element analysis), ecology and the life sciences, medicine (palaeo-pathology and palaeo-epidemiology) ethnography and social theory are among the outstanding contributors.
Indeed, one cannot deny that our knowledge about, and understanding of the prehistoric past have grown almost exponentially. At the same time, we have become aware of many more of our biases and of the limitations of our discipline. Much of that has been achieved through a dialectic between what might be described as three schools, ‘Positivist’, ‘Marxist’ and ‘Structurationist’. On the other hand this book is born from an increasing frustration with the narrow, pitched epistemological and ideological battle which has been a ravaging side-effect of this dialectic over the last decade.
Any nation, any discipline and any ‘school’ characterizes and distinguishes itself by retaining, and propagating, a caricature of its neighbours and competitors. In order to change the course of (intellectual) history, it seems often necessary to reduce ‘the other’ to a fixed point which provides leverage against the current dynamic. Once a new approach, a new ‘school’ or a new paradigm have been established, the situation often becomes more relaxed, and elements of seemingly opposing ideas contribute to a more mature discipline. In archaeology, the different approaches have succeeded each other so rapidly that the more mature phase of each has not really been reached. The rather reductionist nature of the discipline as a whole, working as it does from an almost infinite number of very partial and often ambiguous data towards very general and global ideas, is possibly responsible for that, at least in part.
It seems to us that a more pluralistic approach is called for, one which recognizes process and event as complementary aspects of human history and tries to steer a course between the oversimplification which is inherent in so-called ‘laws of human behaviour’ and the limitations of extreme contextualism. In effect an attempt at understanding the past which accepts its own inherent limitations and foibles and notably does not try to explain everything from the same point of view, but makes a virtue of poly-ocularity.
There are categories of problems raised by our past as it is observed in archaeology, such as those raised in this book, which could benefit from the fact that in a number of neighbouring disciplines the study of the relationship between the recurring and the unique has led to unsuspected and often counterintuitive results, linking phenomena at the microscopic level (in our case that of the individual) to those at the macroscopic level (in our case that of the society) and explaining the spontaneous emergence of qualitative transformations.
In this book we explore some aspects of these developments which have aimed at describing the non-recurrent, the unstable and the unpredictable in formalized and relatively simple terms. In his lecture to the Nobel prize committee (1978), Prigogine characterizes this approach in very simple terms. Commonly, he argues, one describes a (convection) flow as a disturbance in an otherwise stable system, the basin full of liquid in which it occurs. But a very different perspective results when one takes the flow to be a (temporarily stable) structure in a basin full of random movement. Then, irreversible direction (and thus change) becomes the focus, rather than undirectedness or reversibility (1978, p. 779). Along with the perspective, the questions which one asks change as well, as do the kinds of data which one collects, indeed the kind of phenomena which arouse interest.1
One aspect of this wide field has become known in archaeology through the efforts of Renfrew, Cooke, Zubrow and a few others as ‘Catastrophe Theory’ (Renfrew and Cooke 1979). Another aspect has in the last few years had much publicity under the popular title ‘Chaos Theory’ after the fact that one is sometimes able to describe apparently incoherent (chaotic) behaviour in deterministic terms (e.g. Gleick 1987). But in much more encompassing terms, what is at stake is the realization that many phenomena are in part or as a whole due to non-linear dynamics, sudden accelerations or decelerations in certain parameters, which make this field the area of the study of the change of change, and one of its primary formal tools the calculus of difference and differential equations (Renfrew et al. 1982, Part III).
Our exploration into the non-linear properties resident in societal systems is a first and tentative one. We hope it will provoke a level of reflection and debate within archaeology similar to that which is going on in a wide range of disciplines, from medicine and tectonics to ecology and meteorology, via urban studies and the science of organizations.
Archaeology and long-term change
Archaeological research is, by definition, fundamentally concerned with dynamical description and interpretation, and particularly with questions relating to the long-term evolution of societal structures. However, the processes which are ultimately responsible for structuring long-run societal dynamics are both elusive and unpredictable. At the root of this problem lies the difficult task of unravelling the complex array of micro-macro interactions which link individual purposive action to the larger-scale collective processes that produce societal change; in short, we have a somewhat less than perfect understanding of cultural dynamics.
A measure of this difficulty is the fact that our ability to account for the dynamical properties at the heart of social transformation is severely constrained by questions of causality; thus, while there is ample evidence for the propensity of human social groups to generate complex adaptive solutions to the plethora of social, political and economic problems with which they are faced, equally there are many instances in which disorder and collapse can emerge as unanticipated consequences from well-ordered and apparently stable organizations.
A key question that arises from such observations is whether an understanding of the structural relations surrounding societal dynamics, and their reproduction through time, can be attained. Within contemporary archaeology a variety of theoretical approaches, positivist, Marxist, structuralist and post-structuralist, have attempted to address this issue, each one in turn essentially obscuring the intrinsic complexity of the problem by superimposing a single theoretical lens through which the data are to be viewed. Epistemological purity is deemed eminently preferable to any attempts at trans-disciplinary or integrated frameworks; under this rubric, pluralistic approaches are intellectually suspect. Yet, as we shall argue here, the future of archaeology as a more effective contributor to debate within the human sciences rests precisely in the contact and enrichment provided by research areas beyond the narrow confines of archaeological theory. The present book is intended as a step in this direction.
What is at issue is the need for an appropriate research strategy that will facilitate an appreciation not only of the structural relations involved in societal reproduction but equally of their place in the long-term behaviour of societal systems. That the interrelationship of these two scales is far from obvious is readily borne out by a continuing debate within archaeology, as a variety of theoretical approaches have sought to establish a working definition of cultural evolution (e.g., Hodder 1986, 1987a, 1987b; McGlade 1990; Shanks and Tilley 1987a, 1987b; Renfrew 1982, 1985, 1987; van der Leeuw 1982, 1989, 1990a). Despite the epistemological and methodological diversity represented by these orientations, they all articulate a common concern; i.e., is it possible to construct convincing models of social change which adequately account for the status of individual events and the role of human agency, and if so, what is the precise relationship between these microscopic levels of description and the ‘longue durĂ©e’ of historical evolution?
While Braudel’s (1973, p. 1244) injunction that ‘the long-run always wins in the end’ has a deterministic appeal which is not entirely spurious, it is a philosophical position which effectively misrepresents the ‘active’ nature of individual participation in culture. Clearly, we must acknowledge the power of ‘directed, intentional behaviour’ as capable of producing structural change, though whether this can ever be regarded as a primary motive force, as some have suggested (e.g., Hodder 1986, p. 41), is debatable.
Some measure of the complexity of this problem is to be found in the fact that while social change proceeds through the conscious choices exerted by human actors at the household, community and urban levels of interaction, equally, the trajectory of history is strewn with discontinuities and abrupt transitions which are a consequence of the unintentional and the idiosyncratic, of the curious power of unanticipated or random events to alter and reshape the social trajectory.
Understanding the processes which generate both continuous and discontinuous change in the dynamical evolution of complex socio-cultural systems is thus of critical importance for archaeology. Its contribution to the construction of long-term history is predicated on its ability not only to isolate the key processes involved in structural transformation, but also to provide interpretive and analytical frameworks for their elucidation.
The fundamental problem is of a dual nature; on the one hand, there is a need at the micro-level to come to terms with the role of agency in societal reproduction, while on the other hand, at the larger macro-level, archaeology needs to assess the contribution of such behaviour to the long-term structuring of societal organization and vice versa.
Temporalities and structure
Order, disorder and continuity
Conventional archaeological description of the long-term is generally biased towards the notion of continuity, as though it were a prerequisite for the construction of narratives. A prominent aspect of such attempts at historical reconstruction is the implicit belief that once we can ‘fix’ events in time, then somehow we can ‘know’ them, or extract meaning; we can then logically fit them together and organize them into a coherent classificatory sequence. Taxonomic ordering thus becomes the key to the establishment of a secure chronology and ultimately to evolutionary understanding. Central to such a preoccupation is the need for finer and finer temporal discriminations and it is here that the chronometric techniques of archaeological science (e.g., C14 dating) are seen to fulfil the need to fix even more securely a linear, temporal event sequence.
This century-old preoccupation with chronological ordering has been eminently successful, if we are to measure it against the proliferation of narratives that account for socio-cultural evolution – especially those which have been concerned with establishing history as a gradual unfolding of events that is consistent with a ‘simple to complex’ progression. Central to such a view is that disjunctions or discontinuities in our chronological sequence are simply hiccups – gaps awaiting the inevitable arrival of new data sets. The almost unconscious desire to construct a developmental ordering of events means that should the appropriate data not be forthcoming, then it is a question of ‘papering over the cracks’; we can then proceed with the business of constructing ‘seamless narratives’.
The rather obvious fear is that without these narrative structures, archaeology will fail in its self-appointed role of reconstructing long-term history. It will founder, lost amidst an inchoate mass of material, in which the spectre of disorder and chaos looms large. Archaeological studies are, moreover, predicated on one of the most enduring of anthropological myths: that of cultural coherence. Under this rubric there persists ‘an archetype of culture as the perfectly woven and all-enmeshing web . . . the central notion of culture as an integrated whole’ (Archer 1988, p. 2). One of the most obvious manifestations of this notion of cultural consistency is to be seen in the archaeological description of a distinctive Neolithic, Bronze or Iron Age society. This effort to create a convincing and identifiable cultural identity – one united by a series of shared beliefs and traditions – has generally been promoted by minimizing difference and anomaly. A ‘smoothing’ process emphasized the apparent consistency in material culture and settlement morphology characteristic of each archaeological ‘age’.
It is thus that our western intellectual heritage has conditioned us to pursue coherence and similarity as the mainsprings of classification: disorder, discontinuity and difference have no place in this scheme; they are aberrant categories which must be underplayed or judiciously edited out of interpretive and explanatory discourse. Elsewhere (McGlade 1990, p. 71) it has been pointed out that this conventional emphasis on similarity and concordance effectively distorts the archaeological record. We are led further and further away from the diversity in the data; its intrinsic complexity is homogenized, reduced to manageable classificatory entities, all in the service of convincing narrative construction. Instead, we might do well to heed van der Leeuw’s (1989, 1991, pp. 35–6) injunction and attempt to discover more and more dimensions of variability in our data, rather than fewer and fewer.
We argue that it is precisely the aberrant, the discontinuous and the ‘different’ categories of data which form the rudiments of an alternative theory of change – one predicated on the importance of instability rather than stability as the basis from which a more insightful understanding of historical process can emerge.
From a methodological perspective we are seeking insight into the structure of the spatio-temporal mosaic that is presented to us as the residue of extinct patterns and processes. This has long been the special preoccupation of the structuralist tradition in the social and historical sciences. Emphasis has principally focused on those long-run continuities in the history of the large-scale geographic, economic and cultural currents that underpin local events such as politics, wars and other short-run phenomena. For the French Annales School originating in the 1920s in the work of FĂšbvre, Bloch and (later) Braudel, such structures were essentially independent of the details of individual, con...

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