Archaeology: The Key Concepts

Colin Renfrew, Paul Bahn, Colin Renfrew, Paul Bahn

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134370405
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Social Sciences
• Categoria: Archaeology

From two of the best-known archaeological writers in the trade, this outstanding resource provides a thorough survey of the key ideas in archaeology, and how they impact on archaeological thinking and method.

Clearly written, and easy to follow, Archaeology: The Key Concepts collates entries written specifically by field specialists, and each entry offers a definition of the term, its origins and development, and all themajor figures involved in the area.

The entries include:

• thinking about landscape
• archaeology of cult and religion
• cultural evolution
• concepts of time
• urban societies
• the antiquity of humankind
• archaeology of gender
• feminist archaeology
• experimental archaeology
• multiregional evolution.
  

With guides to further reading, extensive cross-referencing, and accessibly written for even beginner students, this book is a superb guide for anyone studying, teaching, or with any interest in this fascinating subject.

ARCHAEOLOGY:
THE KEY CONCEPTS

AGENCY

All theories of the past rely implicitly upon some concept of human nature: why humans behave the way we do, and how our behaviour relates to our social and physical environment. In culture historical views, for example, humans act primarily to reproduce their particular cultural traditions; in functionalist views humans act in response to environmental conditions to maximise their chances of survival. Such a concept is a necessary, though often unstated, bridge to understanding the past, as it allows us to interpret social relations and change in relation to cultural traditions, environmental changes, and so on.

In broadest terms, agency theory in archaeology is the attempt to state our model of the human agent explicitly and to trace out its implications for past societies systematically. Within this broad and varied rubric, the concept of agency has historically been invoked primarily within two distinct approaches, which build on contrasting views of symbols and of power.

Primarily within the American processualist tradition (see p. 212), scholars have explained social change as resulting from the strategies of ambitious political actors. Here, while it is acknowledged that actors live and act within particular world views and traditions, it is assumed that all humans are motivated by the desire to pursue prestige and power. Power is thought of as the personal control of other people's actions, and it is assumed that power and prestige provide cross-culturally recognisable motivations; symbols are manipulated ideologically to convince others. The political-strategising view of agency has underwritten much sophisticated understanding of how political and economic processes resulted from individual actions. However, it has a number of limitations. Theoretically, if we assume that intentional human action is conditioned by a particular historical and cultural framework, this approach has limited potential for explaining how that framework comes into being. If political actors are trying to win at a game, where do the rules they follow come from? How do they believe in their symbols while manipulating them strategically? Empirically, the unconscious and unintentional consequences of individual action may be more consequential in explaining social relations than what the actor thinks he or she is doing. Moreover, this approach has always been more successful at explaining would-be leaders, particularly male heads of households, than followers or the community as a whole, a limitation which reflects gendered assumptions in how agency is defined.

The second tradition of agency in archaeology comes from a deeper and more robust philosophical tradition, deriving originally from Marx's idea of ‘praxis’ — in Marx's view, human action in the world both has external physical consequences and shapes the actor: factory work creates both an economic product and a state of consciousness in the worker. This concept was developed in the work of post-structuralists such as Giddens and Bourdieu (see p. 134–5). According to Giddens, in human action, structures allow people to act and constrain how they can act, while at the same time individual actions perpetuate structures (a process termed the ‘duality of structure’). One implication is that any action reproduces many beliefs and habits, of which the actors intend or are even conscious of only a few. A man opens a door for a woman: he may intend only ‘normal’ courtesy, but his action relies upon and perpetuates a particular view of enabled males and passive females. Bourdieu similarly postulates a relationship between the actor's ‘habitus’ (see p. 133) or deeply entrenched attitudes and values (for example, how being male in a particular society is understood) and the pragmatic strategies people use to pursue these values (for example, to gain male prestige or honour). As Bourdieu notes, the actor's deeply held values do not rigidly dictate specific actions, but rather provide a framework of practical logic through which actors understand situations and which underwrites their strategies. In both writers, power does not consist solely of controlling other people's behaviour, but is a more diffuse aspect of all social relations.

The work of Bourdieu, Giddens, Foucault, Sahlins and Ortner on agency began to influence archaeology in the early 1980s, particularly in the work of Barrett, though the basic concepts underwrite much of post-processual theory (see p. 207). Different post-processual theorists use agency in varying ways and with varying degrees of explicitness. The centre of gravity, to the extent there is one, covers the idea that humans are born into a world of meaningful structures. In acting, we not only carry out a particular action which we intend, but also reinforce and perpetuate these structures in ourselves and the social relations we act within. A funeral, for example, does not necessarily or only demonstrate the hierarchical status of the deceased; it may mask this status, emphasise the collective nature of the community, provide an emotional sense of belonging, reproduce cosmological notions (i.e. ideas about the nature of space, time and the universe) and a general sense of authority, and so on. Within this general approach, there has nonetheless been controversy. Some theorists have seen structures and meanings as relatively stable and even rigid, while others focus on humans’ ability to redefine the meaning of symbols in the moment of action. Similarly, some have seen the individual as a necessary unit of action while others have inveighed against the modernist concept of personhood implied by the concept of a bounded, rational individual. The limits of the social-reproduction approach to agency generally complement that of the political-actor approach. Some reflect the choice of theoretical ground. Because interpretation has focused upon local scenarios, there has been little use of agency to explain long-term, large-scale or comparative patterns of change. A reaction against functionalist approaches has led to neglect of environmental, demographic and economic contexts, and a focus on meaningful human experience in a short-term present has sometimes led to interpretations lacking a developed politics and economics. More generally, relations between enduring structures and the actors’ freedom to reconfigure or reinterpret them in action remain poorly explored (as indeed they are in social theorists such as Bourdieu, in spite of his post-structuralist polemic); Giddens’ ‘duality of structure’ is sometimes invoked as a rather mystical mantra to cover this problem rather than a tool for probing it.

While these two theoretical traditions remain strong, such a survey overlooks much stimulating work by scholars not working within easily stereotyped camps. An increasing number of American scholars have adopted key points from both views in a convergence not easily described in terms of the processual/post-processual split. The core elements of agency theory within a broadly synthetic view include:

1	humans reproduce their being and their social relations through everyday practices;
2	practices take place in material conditions and through material culture;
3	practices happen within historical settings inherited from the past, including cultural beliefs, attitudes and habits; thus actors possess values which both help them to act and constrain their actions;
4	in action, humans do not simply reproduce their material conditions, inherited structures of meaning, and historical consciousness, but change, reinterpret and redefine them as well.

This is an abstract statement of first principles which requires intervening layers of theory before we can apply it to archaeological situations. To some extent, useful general theory is self-effacing: we know it is serving us well when we can get on to interesting interpretations. Here a broad research agenda based on these includes a number of key themes, among others:

• the body, embodiment, and feminist archaeology (see p. 116): the body is the principal physical locus of experience and the medium through which we act, understand our own identities and communicate them to others.
• material culture studies: like the body, material things are a medium through which we create ourselves and understand other people, and hence an inescapable element of social reproduction. Artefacts are a key to social relations and frames of mind. Indeed, there has been considerable debate among archaeological theorists about whether things can be considered as agents in the same way people can. Among the many ways in which material things relate to agency, we might note particularly technology as a system of social knowledge and embodied action, the use of everyday things to communicate subtle political meanings such as the authority of the state, the contextual use of material things to redefine or contest inherited meanings, and the question of the extent to which the archaeological record itself might be an intentional creation.
• power: if power is defined culturally, we can trace the development not only of ways in which agents tried to seize political control, but also the ways in which these attempts arose from specific culturally defined ways of thinking rather than ‘universal’ motivations such as power or prestige. We can also investigate how cultural beliefs relate to political structures and how people resist or contest political domination through cultural struggle.
• long-term history: through archaeology's time depth we can trace the trajectory of practices and institutions as each generation reproduces inherited cultural logics in new historical contexts.

Suggested reading

Barrett, J. 1994. Fragments from Antiquity: An Archaeology of Social Life in Britain, 2900–1200 BC Oxford: Blackwell.

The classical source for an elegant use of post-structural agency theory in long-term archaeology.

Bourdieu, P. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. New York: Cambridge University Press.

An important statement of practice theory.

Dobres, M.-A. 2000. Technology and Social Agency: Outlining a Practice Framework for Archaeology. Oxford: Blackwell.

An important recent synthesis and re-formulation of agency theory incorporating elements of phenemonology.

Dobres, M.-A. and Robb, J. (eds) 2000. Agency in Archaeology. London: Routledge.

An edited volume containing a wide variety of interpretations of agency in archaeology, illustrating most of the positions referred to above.

Giddens, A. 1979. Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure and Contradiction in Social Analysis. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Lays out the theoretical basis of agency in sociology.

Johnson, M. 1989. Conceptions of Agency in Archaeological Interpretation. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 8: 189–211.

A historical review of how agency has been used in archaeology.

Further reading

Barrett, J. C. 2001. Agency, the Duality of Structure, and the Problem of the Archaeological Record, pp. 140–64 in (I. Hodder, ed.) Archaeological Theory Today. Oxford: Polity Press.

Earle, T. 1997. How Chiefs Come to Power. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Hegmon, M. 2003. Setting Theoretical Egos Aside: Issues and Theory in North American Archaeology. American Antiquity 68: 213–44.

Marcus, J. and Flannery, K. V. 1996. Zapotec Civilization: How Urban Society Evolved in Mexico's Oaxaca Valley. London: Thames and Hudson.

Pauketat, T. R. 2001. Practice and History in Archaeology: An Emerging Paradigm. Anthropological Theory 1: 73–98.

Price, T. D. and Feinman, G. (eds) 1995. Foundations of Social Inequality. New York: Plenum.

Sahlins, M. 1985. Islands of History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Shackel, P. A. 1993. Personal Discipline and Material Culture: An Archaeology of Annapolis, Maryland, 1695–1870. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.

Tilley, C. (ed.) 1993. Interpretative Archaeology. Oxford: Berg.

JOHN ROBB

THE ANTIQUITY OF MAN

Although many ancient cultures – including the Greeks, Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians as well as ancient Mesoamerica – believed that humankind was tens of thousands of years old, such a notion does not seem to have existed in medieval Europe where the only framework for the origins of humanity lay in written documents, and, especially, the Bible. By the seventeenth century, attempts to develop a chronology for the whole of human history had culminated in the famous calculation by Archbishop Ussher that the world was created at noon on 23 October 4004 BC (see p. 65).

One of the most important factors which helped to alter this state of affairs was the work of the Danish naturalist Niels Stensen (Nicholas Steno) who, in 1669, drew the first known geological profile, and recognised that such profiles represented the process of sedimentation and stratigraphic superimposition (see p. 244) – i.e. the idea that later layers must lie on top of earlier ones.

One of the first archaeological applications of this principle came in 1797 when a British gentleman, John Frere, discovered worked stone tools, including Lower Palaeolithic handaxes, in a brick quarry at Hoxne in Suffolk. They were at a depth of 4 metres (13 feet), in an undisturbed deposit containing the bones of large extinct animals. Frere not only realised that the stones were artefacts, but also attributed them to ‘a very remote period indeed; even beyond that of the present world’. But despite publication in Archaeologia, the journal of the Society of Antiquaries, Frere's discovery went unrecognised for decades.

Some years earlier, in 1771, a Bavarian pastor, Johann Friedrich Esper, had found human bones associated with remains of cave bear and other extinct animals in Gaillenreuth Cave, near Bayreuth in the German Jura. He speculated that the bones could be those of a Druid, an ‘Antediluvian’ (i.e. someone who lived before the biblical Flood), or someone more recent, but he concluded that they must be intrusive to the deposits containing the extinct animals – he did not dare presume that they could be of the same age.

Nevertheless, scholars were beginning to challenge – albeit very tentatively – the account of the Earth's formation as given in the Book of Genesis. The stratigraphic principle was applied to the study of fossils in geological layers, while palaeontologists such as France's Georges Cuvier were studying the differences between fossil animals and their modern equivalents, seeing the differences increase with the age of the layers. Yet Cuvier did not believe that fossil humans had coexisted with vanished animal species found in ‘antediluvian’ deposits that predated the Flood. He went by the Bible, and thought that humans appeared after the anima...