Archaeological Theory in the New Millennium

Introducing Current Perspectives

Oliver J. T. Harris, Craig Cipolla

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317497448
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Social Sciences
• Categoría: Archaeology

Archaeological Theory in the New Millennium provides an account of the changing world of archaeological theory and a challenge to more traditional narratives of archaeological thought. It charts the emergence of the new emphasis on relations as well as engaging with other current theoretical trends and the thinkers archaeologists regularly employ. Bringing together different strands of global archaeological theory and placing them in dialogue, the book explores the similarities and differences between different contemporary trends in theory while also highlighting potential strengths and weaknesses of different approaches.

Written in a way to maximise its accessibility, in direct contrast to many of the sources on which it draws, Archaeological Theory in the New Millennium is an essential guide to cutting-edge theory for students and for professionals wishing to reacquaint themselves with this field.

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AN INTRODUCTION TO CONTEMPORARY ARCHAEOLOGICAL THEORY

Confronting dualisms

Introduction

Why does the world need yet another book about archaeological theory? Hasn’t everything already been said? On the shelves of university libraries you can find lots of texts that address different aspects of archaeological thought, and even books declaring that archaeological theory is dead.¹ Matthew Johnson has already published two excellent editions of his lucid book, Archaeological Theory: An Introduction, which covers the history of theory in the discipline from the mid-twentieth century.² So, what sets this book apart? Archaeological theory in the last 15 years has grown increasingly diverse and complicated. The last ‘great revolution’ in archaeological theory, which we sometimes refer to as a ‘paradigm shift’, took place 30 years ago or more, and increasingly the discipline’s structures of thought appear to be fragmentary. From claims that human behaviour is driven purely by evolution, via an emphasis on human identity and agency, to arguments that we need to move away from talking about people at all, archaeological theory sometimes feels less like a toolbox and more like a random collection of unrelated approaches that talk past – rather than to – one another. Despite laudable attempts to bring some of these approaches into dialogue,³ there remain major rifts across the discipline. These divisions lie behind the spurious claims that archaeological theory is stuck in a rut, in some way unhealthy or that it has perhaps perished altogether.

We take the opposite view. Contrary to such arguments, we see recent debates in theory as exciting, vibrant and absolutely essential to the discipline of archaeology. Behind the scenes there are a number of interrelated developments in a series of critical areas that are opening up radical new possibilities for archaeological thought. Hidden in diverse and difficult texts, these can sometimes seem to pass unnoticed, with the arguments between differing positions obscuring what they have in common. As two authors from different backgrounds, studying different periods of the past, with different sources to draw on, we have come together to set out what we think are the most important developments in archaeological thought in the current climate. In this sense, this book emerges from us teaching together and thinking about how to communicate these important ideas to our students and our colleagues.

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Before we get into any of that, though, we need to address a vital question: what do we mean by theory anyway? Johnson⁴ begins the second edition of his book by defining theory as ‘the order we put facts in’. But as he goes on to show, even the notion of a ‘fact’ cannot be separated from the theoretical understandings we have of the world. We could even extend this notion beyond the facts we use to answer our questions, to critically reflect on the very kinds of questions we ask in the first place. Let us think this through in relation to a puzzle that compares our two different areas of research. We will often use puzzles in this book as a device to help us think through different archaeological dilemmas, and our first example starts with something archaeologists often encounter on excavations: a humble, unworked stone. How do we know if this stone is an artefact or not? Is this something you can demonstrate factually? If you were digging an Iron Age promontory site in western Scotland and you came across our stone in a pit, you might ask your supervisor whether the stone was an artefact. The supervisor would look at the stone and, recognising that it has not been modified, declare it simply to be natural and throw it on the spoil heap. Here the ‘fact’ is that this stone is not a ‘cultural object’ because it had not been modified in any recognisable way in the past. Take a similar feature encountered on an excavation on a Native American reservation in New England, where indigenous people are involved in the research. You find a similar stone and again ask your supervisors whether this is worth keeping. Perhaps the Anglo-archaeologist might have a similar response to the one you got in Scotland, but the indigenous archaeologist might tell you that the stone is an important spiritual element from Mother Earth, a prayer set in stone by her ancestors that requires respect and attention. Here the ‘facts’ have changed because of the different theories. Theory one says that physical modification defines human involvement; theory two says that no such modification is required. While your initial response might be to presume that one of these theories is correct – we might call it a science – whereas the other is merely belief, one of the things we will explore in this book is how such a position is deeply problematic. As suggested above, however, we can also go beyond this to think about the very question we posed: ‘is this stone an artefact?’ This question itself is based on a theoretical premise that we can divide the world into things that are artefacts and things that are not – which is in itself a theoretical position. Instead we might ask: ‘is this stone alive?’⁵ This might prompt a whole host of other responses. While you might think that asking if a stone is alive is a pretty strange – maybe even silly – question, we will see later on that this is not necessarily the case.

So, what is theory? Turning back to Johnson’s initial definition, what we are left with is the notion of order – how we organise our interpretations; how we recognise and define data; the different preconceptions, ideas and beliefs we bring into dialogue with one another. This notion of ideas in dialogue is what makes theory so vibrant and so alive. It is always an ongoing debate and story that we are a part of. It is not something that ‘happened’ in archaeology for us to learn about, but rather a process that goes on in our discipline that we need to embrace. As we will see throughout this book, what theory does is grab the assumptions you hold dearest and shake them until they fall apart. It makes you look at yourself and the world around you in new ways, and it also challenges you to embrace what you would otherwise dismiss and reflect critically on your most fundamental truths. ‘Common sense is not enough’, as Johnson so rightly points out.⁶ To this we can add that theory forces us to ask different kinds of questions of our material, and to define our material in new and interesting ways. Not only are the answers to our archaeological conundrums up for grabs, but we can generate whole new sets of questions to ponder.

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Beyond paradigms

On occasion, we have both encountered senior colleagues who claim that ‘nothing has happened in theory since the 1990s’. Here and throughout the book, we are going to show you how wrong that notion is. Most archaeologists think of the history of our discipline in terms of three big transformations. We are told of culture historic archaeology, processual archaeology (or the ‘New Archaeology’) and postprocessual archaeology. We will discuss each of these further in Chapter 2, but for now here is a one-sentence introduction to each. Culture history emphasises the when, where and what of different human ‘cultures’, placing great importance on description, typology and the transformation and spread of material culture through space and time. Processual archaeology, modelled after the natural sciences, asks why and how human culture changed through time, often looking to the environment for explanations. Postprocessual archaeology rejects the idea that archaeology is only a science, and instead embraces questions concerning multiple meanings, symbolism and identity. All histories of archaeological thought rely on this tripartite structure, including the gold standard in our discipline, Bruce Trigger’s A History of Archaeological Thought.⁷ The transformations just described are characterised as paradigm shifts,⁸ a term that comes from the work of the philosopher of science, Thomas Kuhn.⁹ Kuhn defined a paradigm shift as a moment when one set of ways of understanding the world is replaced by another in a revolutionary event. We want to challenge the idea that this captures the way in which archaeological thought has changed through time.¹⁰ A true paradigm shift entails a complete rejection and replacement of what came before. When we look back at the history of the discipline, we find little evidence for such a change. For instance, Ian Hodder, who many archaeologists consider the founder of postprocessual archaeology, still uses typology (from culture history) and radiocarbon dating (a scientific technique) to understand chronology at the sites he excavates. We argue that you cannot be an archaeologist without referring to typologies, employing scientific techniques or concerning yourself with the complexity of meaning and identity in the past. These divisions may be useful as a device for telling the history of archaeological thought, but they have little intellectual value in the present and do not actually exist in practice.

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Contrary to those claims that ‘nothing new has happened in theory since the 1990s’, we argue that change in archaeological thought is continuous. This means that change runs throughout the three ‘archaeological paradigms’ up to the present. The subject matter of this book is the development of archaeological thought in the new millennium – what many archaeologists might consider later postprocessual thought up to the present. As we just reasoned, however, these debates are built upon the bedrock of theory set in place by the history of earlier ‘paradigms’. Of course, we do not see this bedrock as static and completely intractable either. We regularly go back and rework our understandings of ‘older’ concepts like typology even as we pursue new research agendas.¹¹ In short, we find that many aspects of our concerns predate the later postprocessual label that some will attach to this book.

Theory in the new millennium

What this book examines, then, is developments in archaeological thought since the year 2000. We won’t be strict about this date, of course, with various chapters dipping a little further back in time, but it does represent our primary focus. What this book is not, however, is an encyclopaedia of archaeological thought during this period. We are not trying to cover every perspective, or indeed every single approach. There are several reasons for this. First, such a book would be enormously long, and still have too little space to do justice to each approach it would need to cover. Second, it would be hard to develop a coherent argument through a book whose aim was to be encyclopaedic. Third, and most importantly, archaeological theory and archaeological theorists are situated – that is, we come with our own interests and expertise, as we discuss below. We are not the best people to write about human behavioural ecology or Darwinian notions of evolution, or other approaches that we will not cover in these pages. These approaches, which play important roles in certain parts of the field, are not directly connected to the questions we are interested in asking, or that we want to engage our readers with (although we will touch upon evolution and ecology from different perspectives in Chapter 9). For similar reasons we focus primarily on archaeological theory from Britain, America and Scandinavia because these approaches form a coherent group, engaging with a particular set of questions.

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TABLE 1.1 Some dualisms that impede archaeological thought

Our book is about a specific set of interrelated developments that have garnered a range of labels. You can variously encounter these notions described as ‘the material turn’, ‘the ontological turn’, ‘the turn to things’, ‘thing theory’, ‘the relational turn’ and so on. They include approaches with names like ‘symmetrical archaeology’, ‘new materialism’, ‘object agency’, ‘materiality’ and ‘Peircian semiotics’. Are these all the same? Perhaps according to those senior colleagues mentioned above, yes, but not to us. These debates are related, as we will see, but not identical, and they offer a dynamic and challenging new set of approaches to thinking about archaeology that have not yet been brought together in an accessible manner – that is what we aim ...