What is Archaeology, Really?
Rob Gargett
Introduction
It is in the exploration of competing ideas and approaches that the relative
values of such ideas and approaches are tested. It is in the exposure of
weaknesses and inappropriateness of propositions that advances are made and
new questions asked. This is rarely, if ever, accomplished unemotionally and
without personal involvement [Binford 1972:45 1].
Since the mid-1970s there has been a proliferation of approaches to prehistory.
Proponents and practitioners of these new research programs implicitly seek answers to the
question "What is archaeology?" There are any number of proposals as to the nature of
archaeology. It is not archaeology, but archaeography (Deetz 1988). It is neither creative art
nor science (Hodder 1986); it is the accumulation of facts (Courbin 1988); it is (or should be)
revolutionary practice, but failing that it may be nothing but the practice of ideological dupes
(Shanks and Tilley 1987a); it is the history of ideology (Leone 1982:754). And there are many
traditional definitions: it is culture history, or human ecology, or cultural anthropology with
time-depth. And so on. I suggest that archaeology is all of these things, and probably a great
many that have not as yet been considered. But it is surely a mistake to assert, as many have
done, that there is only one archaeology or one research program that is appropriate for
archaeologists to follow when interpreting the material taces of the past.
The question "What is archaeology?" breaks down into: 1) the proper object of study,
i.e. the aims and goals of the discipline, and 2) the best way to achieve those goals. Thus
there are definitional and methodological questions. The definitional questions are arguably
transitory, as the history of the discipline (and of science in general) demonstrates - they are
dependent on the worker's culture or 'paradigm' (after Kuhn 1970), and thus are subject to
change (see for example, Binford and Sabloff 1982, Clarke 1973a). The methodological
questions, on the other hand, are perennial - they turn on epistemological and ontological
matters (i.e the grounding of knowledge and the nature of being). The question of the nature of
archaeology, for me, hinges on what science is (i.e. a method of producing particular kinds of
knowledge), and on the nature of the archaeological subject domain (i.e. the real past and its
material traces). It is my purpose in this essay to examine the discipline's concern with the
truth of claims about the past, and to present the newer research programs (and their aims and
goals) as scientific inquiries, albeit having different foci of interest than either the New
Archaeology of the 1960s and 70s, or the 'traditional' practice against which Binford and others
placed the processual program.
At the end, I hope to be able to convert the overview into a conciliatory statement of
sorts. I concur with Wylie, who suggests that "what we need now is not a 'postmodern' or
'post-processual' archaeology, but renewed resolve to come to grips with the problems that
modern, processual archaeology and its antecedents have addressed" (1988:11). I conclude that
real archaeology encompasses all the various approaches taken by archaeologists today, and
that terms such as contextual archaeology, symbolic archaeology, ecological, processual and
even New Archaeology, are redundant. The discipline should realistically include
Robert H. Gargett, Department of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720
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considerations of context, history, individual, symbolic practice, unconscious structures,
biological imperatives, and ecosystems in the broadest sense, and should rule out none of
these, a priori. Instead a deliberate attempt should be made to bolster the empirical
justification for any of them. Calling something contextual archaeology (to use just one
example), partitions it from what other archaeologists do, allows the namer to possess it, and
to present it as the only reasonable way to "do" archaeology. Since the current crop of research
programs has ultimately to justify claims of lmowledge no less than those that went before,
and since it is a philosophical question how to go about doing just that, I will begin with
philosophy of science.
Philosophy of Science
There are a number of reasons why a statement of current trends in archaeological
theory should involve philosophy. Debates centering on aims and goals that were begun
before the 1940s, as well as those since, have all been concerned with, at their base, verifying
knowledge claims. This is ultimately a philosophical question, and one which particularly
involves philosophy of science. For, any endeavor which produces knowledge that is not
simply personal and idiosyncratic must ultimately appeal to criteria of intersubjectivity,
something with which philosophers of science have been concerned for some time. There is,
unfortunately for archaeology, no standard version of what science is or what it does. This has
led to difficulties, as we will see. However the dominant view of science until mid-century
was an empiricist philosophy. My discussion begins with a particularly strident, prescriptive
empiricist program - logical positivism.
Since Hume, and until very recently, philosophy of science has been dominated by
various forms of empiricism, of which logical positivism and the late logical empiricism of
Hempel represent stringent versions. Empiricist philosophy is grounded in three premises.
The first of these is that knowledge is ultimately reducible to experience, obtained by
observation, which on their account is the only source of sure and certain knowledge. Second,
experience itself is "atomistic," meaning it "consist[s] of discrete perceptual elements or
events, such that knowledge can be said to be founded on an irreducible substratum of 'basic'
ideas which correspond directly to discrete, definable (immediate) impressions of sense or
reflection" (Wylie 1982c: 145). These are the "basic data" of experience. Thus, for empiricists,
there is to be no reasoning beyond experience. And this is where a positivist inspired
archaeology encounters severe epistemological indigestion - in the dilemma of coming to
"know" something which literally does not exist, i.e. the "human, cultural" past (Wylie
1989a 1), while employing a philosophy that rules out inferences beyond what is observable.
The third and final epistemological pillar of empiricism is that knowledge is necessarily
restricted to the systematization of observables. It will be seen that this systematization is
what New Archaeologists sought to put behind them in calling for an anthropological,
explanatory discipline, and what they were ultimately restricted to as a result of their adherence
to a logical positivist prescription for 'doing science'.
Positivism, a strict form of empiricist philosophy, relied on formal logic as a primary
tool for the analysis of science (Gibbon 1989:14). This form of empiricism held that there
was a unity of science, with the natural sciences possessing a privileged model of rationality
(not surprising when it is remembered that so many of the proponents of positivism were
physicists). All phenomena were explainable in naural terms without reference to spiritual or
supernatural or metaphysical events (Gibbon 1989:8). This naturalism saw statements of the
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kind, "the unconscious is the first cause of the world" as neither true nor false, merely
meaningless" (Gibbon 1989:16). Adherence to positivist tenets was supposed to create a
"value free and objective" knowledge (Gibbon 1989:26). It can be seen that this is an
untenable view of science and knowledge. It is unable, ultimately, to accommodate even much
well established physical science and is hopelessly incapable of providing useful insight to
archaeologists in its refusal to acknowledge unobservables as the object of study in a scientific
inquiry. Despite years of tinkering, and in debates the substance of which are largely outside
the scope of this presentation, logical positivism and logical empiricist philosophy of science
were ultimately found to be quite incapable of explicating science and scientific knowledge in
any realistic fashion, a point to which I will return in a moment.
The Demise of Positivism
New Archaeology's appeal to positivist tenets usually turned on notions of
scientifically sound explanations, as opposed to speculation or unwarranted inference. For this
reason, this presentation, like those of Gibbon (1989), Kelley and Hanen (1988), and Wylie
(1982c), focuses on the formal characterization of explanation on a positivist account, and the
related question (at least for archaeologists) of confirmation of hypotheses. It is perhaps not
surprising, but unfortunate, that when Binford and others went looking for models after which
to pattern their practice, they went no further than logical positivism, and a vocal adherent,
Carl Hempel. For Hempel, an explanation was only valuable as long as it appealed to
universal laws of nature that could be seen to include the event to be explained. For a
statement to be explanatory, it had to fit in a logical relationship with a "covering law," such
that the explanation logically entailed the event(s) for which an explanation was sought. The
covering law model of explanation, or the Deductive-Nomological (DN) model, then, provided
(or at least aimed at providing) the methodological recipe for secure (i.e. deductively certain)
knowledge.
The extremely narrow view of explanation met with criticisms to which it could not
respond in any convincing way. For example, the logical form of an explanation modelled on
the covering law is conceived as "an argument to the effect that the phenomenon to be
explained ... is just what is to be expected in view of the explanatory facts cited ..." and that
the explanandum (or event to be explained) "follows deductively from the explanatory
statements" (Kelley and Hanen 1988:168). This account of explanation allows, for example,
arguments that fit the model but are not explanations, as well as those that are just not
"relevant to" or "explanatory of" the outcome (Wylie 1982c:177). Moreover, some very good
explanations do not fit the model (Kelley and Hanen 1988:180). The DN model also allowed
"the explanation of any fact by itself" (Kelley and Hanen 1988:175). Thus, it was impossible
for positivists to distinguish lawlike relationships from accidental ones in any formal sense
that could satisfy empiricist criteria (Wylie 1982c:177). Many good explanations are just not
logically entailed in a deductive sense. They are, instead, inductive inferences, often based on
probabilities. Adherence to deductive entailment caused trouble for archaeologists who
imported positivist notions to their investigations.
For me one of the most telling shortcomings in what the positivists wanted from an
explanation - the symmetry of explanation and prediction - is that it rules out a good
number of perfectly adequate explanations that are already an accepted part of the natural
sciences. For example, we can explain the diversity of life with the fact of evolution, but we
can in no way predict the direction it will take, except in the broadest terms. Historical
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explanations such as evolution would be ruled out in a strictly positivist science. Thus, there
is a real sense in which pragmatic considerations must be included in any model of
explanation.
Finally, as Wylie notes, the positivist account
misrepresents explanation at a most fundamental level; explanation cannot be
characterized adequately in purely fonnal terms as an argument whose structure
establishes a pattem of expectation. Explanation of unique events and the
"monster" explanation cases [Those of the kind: Mr. Jones took his wife's
birth control pills every day for a year and during that time he did not get
pregnant. Thus Mr. Jones did not get pregnant because he took his wife's
pills.] suggest, in particular, that this formalistic approach obscures an
essential source of explanatory power, viz., background and contextual
knowledge (i.e. the content, as opposed to the form of the "argument") about
how and why the cited antecedents produced, and hence, explain the
explanandum "effects" in question [1982c:185].
It is this contextualist challenge to the basic data thesis of empiricism to which the program
was unable to respond in any convincing way. Observation, it can be seen, is ultimately
dependent on theory. Data are "theory-laden." One does not meet the world with a naked
consciousness, instead the world is met, and infused with meaning, constituted in a real sense,
through the background knowledge and in the particular context of the observer. Indeed, "the
very possibility of experience depends on the active structuring of a perceptual field" (Wylie
1982c:203). Kuhn's (1970) influential analysis of scientific revolutions turned on an
incommensurability thesis that depended on this notion of the context of the worker, and the
constituted nature of knowledge, contra empiricists like Hempel. As Wylie has noted (1989b),
it is ironic that New Archaeologists such as Binford should have appealed to the Kuhnian
notion of 'paradigms', thus legitimizing their new research program, in proclaiming that a
paradigm shift had occurred, while at the same time embracing positivist prescriptions for
explanation.
Summing up, logical positivist philosophy of science, which privileged experience,
and held a concept of knowledge as consisting of particles of experience, contained within it
no possibility of determining underlying structures and relationships which would constitute a
satisfying explanation of interesting phenomena. It is impossible to maintain, as the
empincists did, that "sensory experience is the (sole) source or basis of knowledge of matters
of fact and that this experience consists of a series of basic, immutable impressions (i.e., from
which all other ideas or cognitive contents 'arise')" (Wylie 1982c: 167). The contexual insight
and the constituted nature of knowledge ultimately undermine the empiricist program.
Although certain empiricists like Hempel (and to some degree M. Salmon [1975, 1978,
1982a, 1982b] and W. Salmon [1982]) have attempted to 'liberalize' the empiricist framework,
they have failed because they include in the description of a satisfying explanation
unobservable relationships that are meaningless on an empiricist account. A much richer view
of science and of the production of knowledge is available in 'scientific realism', and it is this
to which I now turn.
A Realist Account of Science
In the 1960s philosophy of science began to include "a more focused exploration of the
way science actually operates, with explicit attention to the historical, sociological, economic,
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and political factors that affect the doing of science" (Kelley and Hanen 1988:19). Recognizing
the distinct failure of positivist accounts adequately to characterize explanation, theory or
confination, and that this failure was grounded in the empiricist notions about knowledge, a
more ralistic account of science emerged (Wylie 1982c:230).
While retaining the same broad goals for science as those held by positivists (such as
intersubjectivity of knowledge, verification, etc.), the realist account makes significant
additions to the scope of scientific explanation. Causation is seen as fundamental to
explanation, not as an epiphenomenon, and as the thing that makes the world work, not
something to be rejected as meaningless because it is unobservable. On a Humean, empiricist
account causation is seen merely as the temporal displacement and constant conjunction of
two observable events. There is no sense on Hume's account that there is any processual
relationship between two events related by cause. This is Hume's 'regularity theory'. When a
string is plucked, he would say that the sound follows the vibration in all cases. Thus, a
causal relation exists because all such sounds follow all such pluckings. A realist knows that
the regular relation between these may provide evidence for the existence of a
causal relation. But in saying that there is a causal relation, we mean also that
there is some intervening mechanism which, in this instance, is described by
means of the theories of sonic physics and neuro-physiology [Keat and Urry
1975:28].
Through "systematic study of more accessible and familiar causal processes and mechanisms"
scientists succeed ultimately in "bring[ing] into view underlying causal processes ... without
lapsing into pure (empirically unsupportable) speculation" (Wylie 1982c:204-205).
Science achieves success in theorizing about the world mostly through the use of
models, analogies to better understood phenomena that help to explain how observed events
came about. These are more or less successful because they capture, in essence, causal
relationships between observed and unobservable, something which would not have been
admitted in an empiricist account. And it is this admission that "causal efficacy and causal
necessity [are] knowable features of empirical reality" (Wylie 1982c:281) that fundamentally
sets scientific realism apart from empiricism. Including causality as a basic component of
explanation expands the kind and number of questions that can be answered. History is allowed
back into explanation. On a realist account
answers to why-questions (that is, requests for causal explanations) require
answers to how- and what-questions. Thus, if asked why something occurs, we
must show how some event or change brings about a new state of affairs, by
describing the way in which the structures and mechanisms that are present
respond to the initial change [Keat and Urry 1975:3 1].
A historical science, like evolutionary biology, includes explanations that are like narratives,
where concepts are involved and antecedent events are connected in causal ways to change
(Flannery 1986:514). Description becomes a necessary part of explanation, the "how" and
"what" of processes are every bit as important as the why.
In summarizing, then, it should be stressed that (at least for the purposes of this
presentation) causal relationships, "relations of natural necessity that exist in the physical
world" (Keat and Urry 1975:27), understood through the construction of models analogizing
known to unknown processes and mechanisms, are the stuff of science. This is a far cry from
the sterile, formal treatment of knowledge and explanation allowed in an empiricist
Eramework.
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Crumbling Foundations
Although the New Archaeology's break with 'traditional' practice is well documented in
several monographs (e.g. Courbin 1988; Gibbon 1989; Kelley and Hanen 1988; Wylie
1982c), several points of concordance between empiricist philosophy and archaeological
practice prior to the 1960s should be highlighted in order to demonstrate why the New
Archaeology program never really got out of the staring blocks as positivist-inspired practice,
in spite of its worthwhile goals for the discipline.
In "Some Aspects of North American Archaeology," Dixon fired the first shot in what
would be a desultory duel between strict empiricist archaeological practice and an archaeology
that had as its goal the explanation of cultural phenomena, when he said:
We are today concerned with the relations of things [not just the things
themselves], with the whens and the whys and the hows [1913:565].
Archaeology as it was normally carried out according to his observation had demonstrated "too
little indication of a reasoned formulation of definite problems, with the attempt to solve them
by logical and systematic methods" (Dixon 1913:563). Clark Wissler's (1917) "The New
Archaeology," eerily prefigured both the name and the aim of what was to take hold in
archaeology nearly fifty years later. It seemed to Wissler as if archaeology was chronically
suffering the empiricist's dilemma, that "any extrapolation beyond 'the data' (as described and
systematized by archaeologists) represented pure speculation" (Wylie 1982c:209). The
empiricist's dilemma had rendered archaeology a discipline concerned mainly with the
accumulation of "minutiae" and the systematization (according, of course, to certain implicit
constructs) of the material of the past (Kluckhohn 1939, 1940). In practice a sophisticated
antiquarianism, archaeology in the first half of the twentieth century held mainly to a
reductivist view of culture as the system of norms shared by the members of the culture (hence
'normative'). This view served to limit the scope of archaeological investigation, because it
characterized culture as monolithic, and just amenable to classificatory/historical studies.
There was an almost official skepticism that was finally articulated by Hawkes (1954)
as a "ladder of inference" that saw ecological, physical environmental, and typological
parameters relatively easy to derive, and which saw social and ideological interpretations as
essentially impossible to acquire because too far removed from the phenomenal domain of the
archaeologist Pessimism among the traditionalists was balanced by the official optimism of,
for example, Kluckhohn and later Binford, and the tension finally resulted in the "little
rebellion" of New Archaeology.
Kluckhohn in 1939 and again in 1940 made it clear that archaeology had problems. And
he criticized empiricism and the development of archaeological theory to that time. His
feelings were shared by Steward and Setzler, who called on archaeology to "shed some light...
on conditions underlying [different cultures'] origin, development, diffusion, acceptance, and
interaction with one another" (1938:7). They recognize that the accumulation of data (however
structured) is a finite endeavor, and they, like Binford, realize that it is an essentially finite
enterprise, for,
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When ... history [has been] ... reconstructed, what task remains for
archaeology? ... shall we cease our labors and hope that the future Darwin of
Anthropology will interpret the great historical scheme that will have been
erected? [Binford 1968a 5].
Others, like Krieger (1944), Brew (1946), Ford (1954), Spaulding (1953), and Hill and Evans
(1972) in the typology debate, articulated the failure of the discipline as it was traditionally
practiced to accommodate an adequate theoretical awareness. The insight emerged that facts are
constructions, and that experience, rather than being the "basic data" of knowledge, is the
arbiter of knowledge. Kluckhohn (1939:33 1) saw no sharp distinction between fact and theory,
as indeed there is not. He saw the need to pay heed to the role of ideology, cultural bias, and
unconscious presuppositions in the construction of "facts." He characterized all such
unreflexive contributions to interpretation as 'enthymematic' (a point also raised by Brew
[1946:451, when he says that "a complex theoretical viewpoint is usually implicit in some of
the most apparently innocent 'statements of fact' ").
Calls for explanatory aims, some of them even with explicit appeal to hypothesis
testing and modelling methodologies, did not, however, result in a turnaround. Archaeologists
were still, for the most part, hampered by an empiricist vision of knowledge and science. A
vicious circle was entered every time the desire for an explanatory discipline was articulated,
since what was desired, i.e. elucidation of unobservable processes resulting in the
archaeological record, was ruled out by an empiricist science (and remains a question for
empirical inquiry even today [see Wylie 1989a]). It can be seen that "the skeptical entailments
of an empiricist framework for archaeology" rendered the knowledge claims of 'traditional'
archaeologists simply the "systematization of experience" (Wylie 1982c:216). It was this
"stable core of epistemic problems" (Wylie 1988:3), of not being able, methodologically to
go beyond the data, that perpetuated inertia in the search for an explanatory science, and that
kept archaeology from achieving its goals.
Archaeology as Anthropology
With the publication in 1962 of "Archaeology as Anthropology," and subsequent
polemic statements by Binford (e.g. 1965, 1968a, 1968b), and by his students and followers
(e.g. Fritz and Plog 1970; Plog 1974; Watson, LeBlanc and Redman 1971), the gloves were
off. The search for archaeological laws, on the positivist model of nomothetic science, was
on. It is tempting to employ 20/20 hindsight, and to call the New Archaeologists
philosophically naive, and methodological zealots, but it only serves to cast a pall on the real
advances in the aims and goals of an anthropological archaeology that were entailed in the
movement. Where 'traditional' archaeology had been skeptical of theory, and eschewed
explanation in favor of conventional interpretations based on generalizations from
archaeological 'data', no such skepticism existed in the program of New Archaeology (Plog
1980:26). Binford's (1962) now famous statement that "the total extinct cultural system" is
obtainable comes to mind here. And, whereas traditional archaeology had held to a view of
culture that was normative and particularizing (i.e. relativist), most anthropologists of the
1950s and 60s, and thus the archaeologists of the 1960s and 70s, sought systemic (i.e.
cultural ecological and evolutionary [after Steward and White]) and comparative understanding
of their phenomena. Hawkes' infamous "ladder of inference" was deemed scaleable in the new
program, although as it has turned out, most New Archaeologists labored at the
subsistence/settlement level of inquiry, while social and ideological inferences awaited "strong
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linkages" (Binford 1983:17) between the archaeological phenomena and their social
determinants. Kluckhohn's critique of 'traditional' archaeology contained the creed for the New
Archaeology of the 1960s:
While taking account always of the circumstance that the processes which
control events are imbedded in time as well as in space and in the structure of
social forms, a primary interest in discovering trends toward uniformity in
human behavior under specified conditions will be, I feel sure, the more
fruitful [Kluckhohn 1940:84].
I would agree that it is the tendency toward comparability in cultures and in cultural behavior
that allows us to apprehend and understand anything at all about others, and specifically to
recognize others as cultual and human. In setting the tone for the next forty years of inquiry,
Kluckhohn was not advocating a 'dehumanizing' form of naturalism and behaviorism, but
rather he was recognizing a fundamental empirical domain of human experience, one he and
others after him felt to be worthy of study. I am not sure that the excessively mechanistic eco-
determinism of Harris (1979) or Winterhalder (Winterhalder and Smith 1981) are entailed in
Kluckhohn's insight, and it is my hope that comparative studies will always form part of the
archaeological inquiry.
It is one thing to espouse the ideal of theoretical transcendence of material constaints
on knowledge of the past; it is another to put it into practice. By the time of the publication
of Explanation in Archeology in 1971, post-positivist philosophers and astute archaeological
observers as well were heaping mostly unheeded criticisms on the New Archaeology progam.
Morgan (1973, 1974), Levin (1973), and Johnson (1972) led the attack, but the power base of
American archaeology was firm, and many more were convinced by the stand taken by the
proponents of the New Archaeology. The (mostly) accurate comments of its critics were
largely ignored. The problems perceived by these critics are just those that have brought the
New Archaeology program to its present, practically paralytic position, namely those
problems delineated in the positivist account of science - the accounts of explanation, and
testing on the covering law and hypothetico-dedwctive model.
Tragically, the goals of Binford, and before him Taylor (1948), Kluckhohn (1939,
1940) and others, have been confounded by a lingering empiricism. So it happens that, when
New Archaeology is taken to task, criticism centers on the methodological, rather than the
substantive aims. As Wylie notes (1989b), it is only a historical artifact that Binford should
have promulgated his theoretical framework (cultual ecology) as the organizing, explanatory
framework in the new progra. If one ignores the restrictive view of science implicitly held
by Binford and others, the substantive goals of Hodder (for example 1982b, 1986) or Shanks
and Tilley (for example 1987a, 1987b, 1989) are really no different than those of the New
Archaeologists - that archaeology tell us something more about the past than descriptions
and chronologies could.
Over and above the external (and internal) criticisms, New Archaeology has shown a
surprising ability to be self-critical in spite of its paralyzing empiricist fabric. David Clarke,
whose Analytcal Archaeology (1968) formulated a British variant of New Archaeology, could
say that "many elements [of the New Archaeology] are unsound, inaccurate or wrong but that
is equally true of much of traditional archaeology" (1973a:12). Flannery, in the same year,
recognized that overly zealous New Archaeologists had come up with no laws, other than
"Mickey Mouse Laws," but that they and others who adopted less explicitly positivist
methods were united in the "dream ... of what archeology could become.... and the nightmare
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... that [certain young traditionalists] will forever keep it the imprecise pseudoscience that it is
today" (1973:53 [emphasis added]).
Renfrew (1982, 1983), and Wylie (1982c), to name just two, identify the problem. The
'law-and-order' group (following Flannery's 1973 terminology) put archaeology in a
paradoxical situation by prescribing as obligatory an explanatory form so little appropriate
that vanishingly few good explanations alrady accepted in the field could be found to conform
to it" (Renfrew 1982: 8). And, from other, less sympathetic voices (e.g. Hodder 1981, 1982b;
Miller 1982) the same tune was heard.
In the twenty-five or so years since "Archaeology as Anthropology" Binford and others
have moved from heady optimism about the limitless empirical content of the archaeological
record to an almost obsessive wallowing in minutiae similar to, but not identical with the
traditional archaeology from which they sought to distance themselves. For example, Schiffer
gives us Behavioral Archeology (1976), his effort to systematize the links between the
archaeological record and the behavior that created it, and more recently Formation Processes
of the Archaeological Record (1988). These are useful examinations of a problem but cannot
be said to be the only concem of archaeologists. In Binford's introduction to For Theory
Building in Archaeology (1977), we are presented to a theme that permeates his writings to
the present (for example 1981a, 1981b, 1989a, 1989b; Binford and Sabloff 1982; Sabloff,
Binford and McAnany 1987). We need, says Binford, independently derived, 'objectively
grounded' means of measuring the variability in the archaeological record - a fool-proof,
'Rosetta Stone' with which to decode the archaeological record. We need to accumulate
'arguments of relevance' to link the static phenomena of the present to the dynamic forces that
created the variability in the past. In calling for this, Binford at once demonstrates his
fundamentally empiricist underpinnings, and dooms archaeology to the systematization of
what are perceived as basic data.
There is, in the work of Flannery, the hope that a systems-oriented, processual program
can lead to valuable knowledge of the past. In the evolution of his program, Flannery has
included more and more of the considerations that New Archaeology has been criticized for
ignoring, such as ideology and belief (see for example, his comment on Sanders work in the
Valley of Oaxaca [1988]). It may be for this reason that Flannery seems to have taken a place
on the periphery of American archaeology, making his greatest impact in scathing
satirizations of practice, such as his "Archeology with a Capital 'S' " (1973), "The Golden
Marshalltown" (1982), and "A Visit to the Master" (1986). These criticisms arise, in the
main, from the New Archaeology's habit of ignoring culture. There is much of value in
Flannery's work, and it is interesting that it has been accomplished under the flag of the New
Archaeology, testament, more than likely, to the value of the aims and goals of the program,
more than to its methodological prescriptions.
The Demise of New Archaeology?
The critical insights of New Archaeology that brought about a break with 'traditional'
practice have been somewhat overshadowed by the methodological failure of a strictly
positivist archaeology. Recognition that it was the empiricist basis of the cultuml historians
that was hobbling the discipline was a distinct break with the past. Furthermore, the
realization that the nonnative view of culture was severely limited in its ability to understand
and explain observed variability in cultures, both archaeologically and ethnographically, was a
profoundly important insight. Unfortunately, by replacing the previous skeptical empiricism
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with an even more stringent version, in positivism, New Archaeology was incapable of
achieving its aims (Wylie 1982c). There is no virtue in being wrong. For their heedless use
of positivism, the "New" archaeologists have to bear the brunt of the blame. But this much is
certain: archaeologists of the 1960s and 1970s who have been called "New" were ultimately
interested in acquiring secure knowledge about the phenomena they studied, and answers to the
questions they asked that were not mere untried speculation. Perhaps, as Gibbon (1989)
suggests, they were performing an action designed to protect and mystify their position and
status in an academic hierarchy; perhaps they simply abducted positivist philosophy of science
in a naive effort to produce the secure knowledge they sought. The desire for knowledge and
understanding of archaeological phenomena has not waned with the "demise" of the positivist
philosophy of science. Questions are turning to the social and ideological, the individual and
contextual, yet alongside what Gibbon (1989) would call the Romanticization of scientific
enquiry, there is an unwillingness to simply abandon the project that seeks to evaluate claims
of knowledge. What form it will take, how it is to be achieved, and what that means for the
scientific status of archaeology is the subject of the next sections.
Marxist Research Programs
There is perhaps no more irresistible theoretical framework in the social sciences than
that of Marx. In archaeology, as in other social sciences including anthropology before it,
Marxist thought represents for its adherents a compelling antithesis to mere ideological
reproduction, and 'vulgar' historiography and sociology. There are a number of different
Marxist perspectives (to borrow a term from Matthew Spriggs) currently in evidence in
archaeology. Each takes what it wants of classic Marxist theory and of more recent tinkerings,
and each constructs a theoretical explanatory framework within which archaeological
investigations are carried out, searching for evidence in the archaeological record that will
instantiate theoretical propositions.
Although Harris's (1968, 1979) theory has attracted nothing but invective from strict
Marxists, cultural materialism must be considered within the framework of Marxist theory,
since its central construct is the relationship between the material and the social/cultural. Its
adaptationist foundation, however, intended to replace the 'Hegelian monkey' of dialectical
philosophy, renders this program, in the eyes of Freidman, "vulgar materialism" (1974). In
the words of Harris, cultural materialism
is the principle of techno-environmental and techno-economic determinism.
This principle holds that similar technologies applied to similar environments
tend to produce similar arrangements of labor in production and distribution,
and that these in turn call forth similar kinds of social groupings, which
justify and coordinate their activities by means of similar systems of values
and beliefs. Translated into research strategy, the principle of techno-
environmental, techno-economic determinism assigns priority to the study of
the material conditions of sociocultural life, much as the principle of naturl
selection assigns priority to the study of differential reproductive success
[Harris 1968:4].
This absurdly reductive program a led to the New Archaeology, mostly because Steward's
cultural ecology and White's cultural evolutionism basically held to similar frameworks.
Harris merely made the link to Marx explicit, whereas it had been implicit in the- work of
Steward and White. Probably because cultural materialism virtually ignores the ideational
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realm as having anything whatsoever to do with the evolution of cultural systems, and
certainly because of its lock-step determinism, it is a program that could not ultimately
survive the criticism of Marxist and for that matter non-Marxist social theory.
The wedding of L6vi-Strauss' structuralism and Marxism came about through a
dissatisfaction with the ability of Marxism to make room for the "vertical structures which
account for societies as entities" (Friedman 1974:445). As with structuralism, Structural
Marxism seeks "knowledge of the fundamental propies of social reproduction which enables
us to predict the way a society will behave over time" (Friedman 1974:445). Calling Marx's
analytical categories such as 'relations of production' merely "functional distinctions,"
structural Marxists, like Friedman, see a particular social formation as nothing more than
"historically specific" manifestations of unknown structures (Friedman 1974:446). Moreover,
Friedman contends that the 'mode of production' is not a technological phenomenon, because
the social relations of production cannot be viewed as technical relations. They are, instead the
"social relations which ... determine the economic rationality of ... the material process of
production in given technological conditions" (Friedman 1974:446). The dialectic is seen by
Structural Marxists like Friedman as an undefined structure, which should be understood to
affect the compatibility of different outward structures in the social formation. Thus "a
contradiction is defined as the limit offunctional compatibility between structures" (Friedman
1974:448) (e.g. between the forces and relations of production). Thus the structural Marxist
program, for Friedman, seeks the relationship between forces and relations of production
which would lead to an explanation for the social formations that have existed in the post, and
that preceded those in the presenL
As Gellner (1982) points out, there is a contradiction, even in this avowedly Marxist
program, between the determinism that is still retained from the materialist framework, and
the notion of historicity in Marxism, which maintains that there are no universal causal
mechanisms because of the dialectical nature of existence- Nevertheless, structural Marxism
would be accommodated by a realist account of science, both because it appeals to empirical
observations, and because it recognizes that there are unobservable causal relationships that
must be elucidated for explanations to come to light.
So-called Neo-Marxist programs that have arisen out of the recognition that relations
between dominant 'complex' groups and historically dependent 'less complex' groups have
probably existed for some time, not simply in the modem, capitalist, world. As a model,
Wallerstein's world system provides a much broader scope for the explanation of variability
within and between groups, by demonstrating how relationships of domination can arise and
be maintained, while always retaining the ability to shift and change as conditions change. A
related concept, that of core and periphery, also begins to capture the subtlety which is
potentially involved in culture change that a purely Marxist account did not accommodate.
Frankenstein and Rowlands (1978) present an account of Early Iron Age society in south-
westem Germany employing the world systems approach to prehistory, while Dietler (1989)
established that a relation existed between the Halstatt culture and Mediterranean groups. The
basis for the Neo-Marxist approaches is, again, essentially empirical. It is seeking to establish
the existence of relationships that have causal relevancy in the explanation of cultural
manifestations.
Recent edited volumes capture the diversity of the Marxist research program as it is
being deployed around the world. I have already mentioned Marxist Perspectives in
Archaeology (Spriggs 1984). It contains a number of thoughtful papers, notably by Kus,
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Rowlands, and Pearson, that seek to explore the archaeological possibilities of Marxism.
Bate's and Tosi's papers in the same volume are evidence that the archaeological recognition of
some of the factors important to Marxian analysis, like quantifications of the productive forces
in an archaeological context, or the visibility of craft specialization and labor allocation, are
going to be every bit as recalcitrant for archaeologists to monitor as population pressure or
niche width have proven for processualists. Miller and Tiley's Ideology, Power and Prehistory
(1984) specifically views the archaeology of relations of power and domination, focussing on
legitimation, by material means, of inequality.
Problems with Marxist Archaeology
For me, there are several problem areas in Marxist theory and its archaeological
application. First of all, there are the definitional problems I see with the dialectic. I would
argue that it is used to describe not just one thing, but several. First, it is a description of
nature - the dialectic as essence. Second, it is a method of analysis - the dialectic as
insight, e.g. unwinding the constituents of a construct. The dialectic, in a special case of the
above, is also an explanation of change - the dialectic seen in contradictions and in the class
struggle that brings about social change. Third, and finally, it is a model for the way humans
think - the dialectic as "an effort to capture and to reduce to communicable discourse
inventive psychic capacity ... distinct from discursive thought" (Heilbroner 1980:55). If,
indeed, the dialectic is all these things, then I would suggest that it is best seen as a
convenient term for a slippery and little understood suite of processes (i.e. anything that has
more than two dimensions), including structures, of interest to Marxists and others. The
dialectic is at best poorly presented as a method, and at worst represents the attribution of
change to a universal ineffable cause. Understanding change as the result of something as
poorly defined as the dialectic is a little like trying to understand evolution with the concept of
variability to hand, but without a notion of selection to give it order. The dialectical view of
"ochangefulness located 'within' things" (Heilbroner 1980:34) is also a convenient shorthand for
a complex (in the case of human societies) history of interaction and change, one that is
arguably different at every point along the way (or at least open to empirical inquiry of the
constituents of change). Neo-Marxists, with a rejection of universal social or cultural laws,
recognize this shortcoming of the dialectic as essence, I think. But with ali its slipperiness,
the model of a dialogue between relational objects or within an object of study is a valuable
heuristic device. As Heilbroner puts it: -"To use the language of discursive thought ... is to use
a language that rules out the very ambiguities, Janus-like meanings, and metaphorical
referents that are the raisons d'Etre for a dialectical view" (Heilbroner 1980:56). For the time
being I would prefer to conceive of the dialectic as an expressive means of describing
complicated processes of which we really know very little, at least where social change is
concemed.
Marx's hope for capitalism's collapse, and his call for political action to hasten its
demise are tied up in his belief in the change inherent and implied in the contradictions he
recognized in the capitalist mode of production and in the inequality at he perceived as unjust
and unnatural. His fervent hope rests on an assertion that it is the dialectic of contradiction
that brings about change, and ultimately the end of the alienation of labor through the class
struggle. By ignoring other determinants of change, or by relegating them to inferior roles,
however, Marx was ultimately restricted in his ability to explain change. It is not clear if his
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aspirations will ever be fulfilled. It is also not clear if, as he would assert, there is one right
way for human groups ultimately to be organized (i.e. along socialist lines).
Many commentators on Marx have noted that there is no account of change in non-
capitalist societies in Marx's original formulations (Heilbroner 1980:71, Kristiansen 1984).
Kristiansen and others are attempting to fill in the missing pieces using general principles
drawn from Marxist-oriented works, especially the process of legitimation. This does not erase
the need, as I see it, to examine how Marx's overall theory was affected by his arguably naive
perceptions about "primitive" societies. His stage-evolutionism, for instance, critiqued by
Bloch (1983:64), presents a lock-step relationship between technology and political systems
that has to a large degree been discredited in the intervening years. Add to this the proposal of
a pristine human condition, that of primitive communism, where "class divisions ... are not
to be found ... [property] is almost non-existent, save for minor personal belongings ... [and]
the economic basis of society ... is seamlessly woven into its social and political functions"
(Heilbroner 1980:70). The naive notion of a golden age of hunter-gatherer cooperation must
surely give way to the recent critiques such as Schrire (1984) and Cashdan (1980). Indeed, the
habit of distilling to an average case all that was known and has since come to be known
about groups organized in less complex fashion than our own has carried on to the present,
and is not unique to Marx, but I think there may be plenty of room for adjustment. In viewing
such groups as in some sense politically stable, egalitarian (except of course for gender and
age inequality), and based on a stable mode of production such as hunting and gathering, Marx
may inadvertently have stacked the deck in his critique of Capitalism. What this means to his
whole theory is unclear at present.
The rather static view of "primitive" humanity, at the mercy of nature, having no
surplus nor any need for surplus, persisting, but not evolving, "gives us no special
explanation as to why or how [they] are disrupted" (Heilbroner 1980:71). The lack of a theory
of historical change for 'primitive' societies and Marx's unworkable classification of modes of
production have been critiqued by Meillassoux, Godelier and Althusser, structural Marxists
who have refined and indeed invented new ways of looking at 'pre-capitalist' modes of
production (Bloch 1983, chapter 6). A richer understanding of the variability of human social
structure is emerging as a result.
The Contribution of Marxist Theory
It will become clear as this exposition proceeds how fundamental are Marxist notions
to the present variety of research programs in archaeology. So for the moment I will restrict
myself to the direct contribution of Marxism to archaeological theory.
On the application of Marxist principles to the archaeological situation and in the
development of theories to account for change in past social systems there are already too
many examples to allow anything approaching a comprehensive review in a paper of this size.
Bender (1978) reminds us for instance, that social relations of production are as important in
charting the transition from hunter-gatherer to farmer, in a paper that seeks to disturb the
complacency of the eco-determinist workers of the 1960s and 70s. Bradley's (1984) excursion
through the prehistory of Britain presents a coherent view of changing ideologies and their
material manifestations, ultimately leading to a non-idealist, non-normative point of view that
still manages to demonstrate the importance of social meaning in things. Self-interest and
larceny are salient in Gilman's (1981) treatment of the emergence of Bronze Age culture in the
Mediterranean. Blackmail and the "Might makes right" mentality were apparendy responsible
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for complexity in Gilman's view. Kristiansen's (1984) tour de force on ideology and material
culture in the Neolithic and Bronze Age of Denmark illustrates how a regional view and
erudition, combined with a Marxist perspective, can enrich and enliven the past. Critical
theory, a valuable off-shoot of Marx's unity of 'theory and practice' thesis, will be dealt with
in a later section, but it too has had a recent profound impact on archaeological theory.
Perhaps the most important spin-off of these Marxist approaches is the archaeological
potential of the role of material culture (the traditional focus of archaeology) in ideological
reproduction and legitimation, a point I raised earlier. This will lead archaeologists more and
more to examine the structures as well as the symbolic systems that are expressed in material
culture, as I will develop in a moment, and will more and more involve historians in the
archaeological enterprise. As Shennan writes,
The concept of ideology then links an approach to material culture [i.e.
stuctural and symbolic] to the understanding of past societies and economies
[i.e. Neo-Marxist] ... it actually does more ... to some extent it dissolves the
distinction between the two since the ideology is actually part of social and
economic reality, inasmuch as it presents aims and ideals and categories in
terms of which people act [Shennan 1986:332].
Previously, archaeologists have dealt with certain categories of material culture, such as
"ceremonial" or "prestige goods" as epiphenomena (Kus 1984:102). As Pearson notes,
"...artifacts are a product of human action and are also used to carry out actions ... it follows
that their meaning derives from their relationship with beliefs" (1984:161). The meaningfully
constituted nature of material culture is also a theme that will be picked up by Hodder, as I
explore in a short while.
Material culture is thus no longer to be viewed as a passive reflection of the beliefs or
norms of a given group. Instead, because of the relationship between ideology and material
culture, we can directly perceive human products that had an active role in structuring social
relations in the past. The introduction of ideology and its role in legitimation and
mystification "opens up ... the search for conditions that govern the cultual manifestations of
material functions and hence determine the interpretation and explanation of a major part of the
archaeological record, whose explanatory potential has hitherto been much neglected" (Meltzer
1981:77). TIus we enter a new domain. As Shennan puts it, archaeology becomes important,
by giving us the ability to describe and explain the things that define and change social
relations (1986:333).
In all this, the role of history, and the roles of individuals begin to assert themselves.
With society viewed not as a monolith, but as composed of individuals each negotiating social
roles (at times using material culture), the products that archaeologists study become more
meaningful as reflections of the social actions of individuals. New Archaeology assigned no
role to individuals and treated social actions as if it were a given that they conformed to
overarching natural principles, selected for by some unknown evolutionary agent. At least
now, the agent can be conceptualized. Individuals are generators of culturl variability through
their ideologically informed actions, and individuals are also forces of selection (to borrow a
term from evolutionary biology), in that they actively promote change. Change, therefore, is
situated within, not exteral to culture, as many archaeologists have asserted in then past. As
a corollary to all of this, although the tendency is to view cultures and societies as essentially
stable, with periods of abrupt change marking transitions to 'higher' states, we should rather
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exrapolate as Pearson (1984:61) does: "We should understand society as continually changing
with the constant reproduction of practices creating an 'illusion' of stasis."
Structuralist Programs
It is perhaps not surprsing that there should be such antipathy between what Hodder
(1985) has called the "postpocessual" archaeologies and the New and traditional archaeologies.
Although they are not (necessarily) anti-empirical, these more recent research programs really
put empiricist science behind them. Structuralism especially defies positivist practice in its
search for unobservable causal mechanisms for human behavior, and w doubt has attacted the
vituperation of New and Old archaeologists because (at least as I read it) investigations are
based on a new ideational concept of culture. This view, much more complex and less
normative than the traditional archaeologists held to, includes the claim that culture is
meaningfully constituted, and reflexive - acting upon and being acted upon by individuals.
In an archaeological context ... where the richness and variability of the
material record is too great to be explicable solely in terms of response to
environmental contraints or stimuli, factors internal to the cultural system
must be considered [Wylie 1982b:41].
Here, Wylie is referring to the discovery of empirically observable regularities in many aspects
of human social production that can only be explained by reference to rules. While the real
nature of the rules that govern behavior is as yet not well understood (and need not be a single
source), it is possible to point to many examples of the presence of rule-governed behavior.
The success of some structural analyses in elucidating the patterning resulting from
unobservable structuring mechanisms gives support to Wylie's (and others) confidence in the
empirical veracity of the research program. A sampling of the literature yields the following
examples.
Perhaps the most successful structural analyses have been undertaken within the context
of historic archaeology. Deetz (1977) gives a good account of how colonial America's
worldview changed through time, through a comparison of structural changes in ceramics,
vernacular architecture, gravestones, grave pits, refuse, cuts of meat, furniture and cutlery.
Between 1760 and 1800 the American mental landscape was transformed from a communal
state where nature is included to a personal and private state that was separate from nature.
Deetz's is a convincing view, only because it marshalls evidence from so many ostensibly
unconnected cultural manifestations. This had to have occurred, says Deetz, "at a deep level of
the Anglo-American mind," for it to have had so profound an effect on material culture (Deetz
1977:127).
Even though there is no corroborating written text against which to understand
generative structures in prehistory, material evidence exists that can potentially illuminate the
cognitive structures of archaeological cultures. Only the method is lacking with which to
'decode' the meaning present in the material. Of course, meaning for the structuralist equates
with the deep structures that generate observed patterns, and indeed meaning is the structure, as
previously mentioned. The search in prehistory, then, is for patterns that could not have come
about randomly, and which represent the transformation of structure into material. Probably
the earliest and most rigorous attempt at deriving a prehistoric structure was the work of
Leroi-Gourhan (1967, 1986). His long study of the painted images from Upper Paleolithic
caves of Europe is not without its problems, nevertheless he was able to recopize clear
associations of depictions of certain animals with each other and their location within caves.
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Furthermore, he describes a 'mythogram' (1986) which defines a deep cognitive structure
relating women, men, and certain animals. This 'mythogram' consists of bipolar oppositions
such as male:female, bison:horse, (1967:150). Leroi-Gourhan, before his death, had backed off
from his conclusions about the meaning of the associations he recognized in the images,
preferring instead to stress the relations (Conkey 1989). Nevertheless, his is tantalizing
evidence that some as yet little understood cognitive mechanism permits humans to make
meaning.
Conkey (1980) was able to identify a structured set of design elements on incised bone
from the early Magdalenian of Cantabrian Spain. Their presence together at the site of
Altamira was used as evidence of its possible use as an aggregation site. Criticisms of her
study raise the question of contemporaneity, suggesting that a lack of temporal control
invalidates her conclusions. I would say that it is an empirical question whether or not such a
conflation is warranted. Clarke (1973b:808), using information from excavations at
Glastonbury many years previously, reconstructs a "building model" that he hoped would
converge with a "conceptual planning model of the individual builders, suggesting something
of the cultural and functional priorities and rules of construction they may have tacitly
followed." He was successful in describing "at least two different categories of linked
structures - pairs of interlinked substantial houses and smaller huts linked to subrectangular
structures" (Clarke 1973b:811-812). These paired structures and intemal divisions were
tentatively identified with the male:female opposition. Although studies such as Clarke's do
not set out to achieve an understanding of the reason for such sets of rules, they do
demonstrate that with further methodological refinement of the sort now championed by
Hodder, the retrieval of meaning will be increasingly made possible in future investigations of
the archaeological record.
By way of summarizing, the structuralist program can be seen as a "theoretical shift in
how archaeological data - especially human material culture - are conceptualized" (Conkey
1989:150). It opens the door to a "reconceptualization ... [of] ... processes whereby humans
construct meaning from experience" (Conkey 1989:151). This is undoubtedly true. There are
problems, both empirical and epistemological, with the strucuralist program, and I deal with
a sample of them now.
Problems with Structuralism
Structuralism has been likened to "killing a person to examine more conveniently the
circulation of the blood," and has been described as "hair-raisingly unhistorical" (Eagleton
1983:109). These criticisms come from within the structuralist school, and will be seen to
arise from the 'post-structuralist' concern with how meaning is constructed, and from the
Marxist concern with historical materialism. All social formations have a history, and it is
this history which has importance to individuals, not necessarily the structure that gave rise to
the social formation. To use an analogy, it is not that we speak, but what is spoken that is
important. Thus, a structuralism that does not consider the meaning manifest in the
observable transformation of a structure is both anti-humanist and (probably) only serves to
reproduce an ideology, not to critique it. From a processual viewpoint, too, it is desirable to
explain change, not just to document it, and not to explain it away by universals that are so
sweeping as to have no explanatory power. In the search for deep structures there is much that
can be learned, but there is much more to be learned from the understanding of surface
meaning, and of the reasons for change.
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Wylie (1982b) has discussed the linguistic analogy and the scientific status of the
structuralist research program in archaeology. She concludes that structural analysis contains
very fruitful insights and should not be excluded from archaeological inquiry. The linguistic
analogy is one way of making sense of what is clearly a system of symbolic meaning, and
that it is an empirical question to what degree the analogy holds and what it means for the
study of archaeology. The success of Chomsky's formulation of a deep structure in language,
most likely having a genetic basis, has spurred the structuralist program in anthropology and
latterly, in archaeology. As a means of (tentatively) modelling cultural variability the
linguistic analogy has proved useful. Wylie (1982b:40) observes that "however much [cultural
constructs] express and reinforce a world view [and thus resemble a language], they cannot be
said to have distinctive, unambiguous 'meaning effects' in the same sense that a linguistic
expression of a world view would have." She continues,
non-linguistic constructs ... may not be intended to produce 'meaning effects'
of the specificity of the messages conveyed by linguistic constructs ... The
archaeological structuralist ... cannot expect that models of specifically
linguistic articulatory mechanisms will apply directly to their field [Wylie
1982b:40].
The fact remains, however, that there is a real sense in which the meaningful cultural
constructs represent "a definable tradition whose distinctive structures of articulation ...
embody a set of intuitions about what constitutes a well-formed construct comparable to the
intuitions identified in linguistics as governing competence or body of stmcturing principles"
(Wylie 1982b:40). There seems to be no reason then, to reject the linguistic analogy, but
there is good reason to be aware that, for the moment (and until there is better evidence for it),
there is no strict correspondence between language and material culture.
Critics have observed that quite often the elucidation of structures in cultures involves
complete immersion over long periods in the material within which structure is sought. This
has led to doubt about what might be called replicability in the inquiry. As Eagleton
(1983:112) observes, "Structuralism appeared to constitute a scientific [elite], equipped with
an esoteric knowledge far removed from the 'ordinary' reader." Indeed, when binary oppositions
are inferred from observations made of the material under study (again along the linguistic
analogy), often no criteria are offered a-s to how the determination of polarities is made. They
are either presented as self-evident (a dangerous position to take) or "somehow explanatory of
the world that the users of the said text live in" (Gellner 1982:119), but again no criteria are
given as to "how one is to identify the crucial polarities [other than genius]." The tenuousness
of the appeal to binary opposites may result from the ease with which "any finite set of
distinctions can be presented as a series of nested binary ones" (Gellner 1982:119). This is not
a problem with structuralism per se, any more than strict loyalty to a linguistic
correspondence is necessarily linked with the structuralist program, but because oppositions
are discovered and appealed to so often as descriptions of generating structure, wariness is here
pscrbed.
Contribution to Archaeological Theory
Implicit in this discussion of structuralism has been the new way in which culture is
conceived, as a meaningful, rather than an environmentally determined complex of human
interactions. Material culture is no longer seen as merely reflective of human social relations,
but rather constitutive of them as well. The insight that there are systems of relationships,
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with observable consequences that are open to empirical enquiry, finally ushers in a real
investigation of the causes of variability in the archaeological record. Whereas the empiricist-
based traditional and New Archaeology espoused the goal of explanations that appealed to
causal mechanisms, they could never untie themselves from the (perceived) need to stick to
what was observable. This proved untenable. In a very real sense, structural analysis represents
an intuitive appeal to a 'realist' philosophical account of science, by seeking the unobservable
structures generating human cultural behavior. As a result, structal analysis leaves open the
possibility for a truly explanatory archaeology, in a way that the New Archaeology never
could. All this optimism, however, must be tempered.
Post-Structural Programs
The logical next step after one begins to think in terms of a linguistic analogy is to
consider the process of making meaning and of constructing it and being constructed by it.
This was the 'post-structuralist' step taken by literary interpretative theory which has been
appropriated by the architects of current archaeology, like Hodder (1982a, 1982b, 1984, 1985,
1986, 1988, 1989a, 1989b, 1989c). The break with traditional structuralism came when it was
realized that signs, like words, did not just represent some thing; instead, they only represented
that thing in terms of the history of the sign, all the other signs to which it might have
reference, and the particular negotiation of that sign by a particular individual. Thus the wraith
of radical contextualism had arrived in the guise of post-structuralist hermeneutics
(interpretative theory). Looking at the archaeological record as a text, rather than as a fossil
record, has far-reaching implications for the inquiry (Patrik 1985), involving a number of
analogies that may take the practice beyond its current limitations. Look at how sophisticated
are the concepts with which we are dealing, and consider the implications for archaeology and
archaeologists, who have now to make sense out of a meaningful domain, with no appeal to
informants, no surety of its commensurability with their own experience-near concepts, and
no, as yet, developed methodology for dealing with any of it. A model of culture is being
developed that can deal once and for all in a realistic way with its complexity, on a textual
analogy, but we know neither the plot, nor the syntax, nor the vocabulary for the text. What
and how can archaeology do with this?
Hodder (1982b, 1984, 1985, 1986) has presented archaeologists with a new set of aims
to elaborate those espoused by New Archaeology. Most important for the "postprocessual"
programs is the realization that individuals are active in structuring their social environment,
not passive components of an ecologically determined system as was maintained by New
Archaeologists. Individuals negotiate social roles, actively create and transform social
strucures. There is "no human nature independent of culture." There is no division between
fact and theory. And there is an inescapable historical dimension to social change (Hodder
1985:2). Clearly, these derive from Marxist, structural, and hermeneutic insights. There is a
reflexive relationship between individual and cultue, and an active role for material culture.
Meaning in prehistory is only derivable through a rigorous examination of context, because
meaning is ulfimately context-dependent (although as will be seen not radically so).
Shanks and Tilley summarize this approach to material culture, melding structuralist
and post-structuralist, Marxist and other approaches, in this manner: material culture should be
thought of as
1) being subject to multiple transformations in form and meaning content;
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2) that its meaning must be regarded as contingent and contextually (i.e.
historically and socially) dependent;
3) that it does not necessarily reflect social reality. There may be various
relations of ideological inversion. Material culture is charged with power
relations;
4) that it forms a framing and communicative medium in, for, and of social
practice;
5) that like a text it requires interpretation but that such an interpretative
process can never end: there are no final answers;
6) that it forms a channel of reified and objectified 'expression', both being
structured and structuring in a manner analogous to a language;
7) that it is a social, not an individual production. The individual agent should
be regarded as being structured through language and material culture;
8) that the meaning of the archaeological record is irreducible to the elements
that go to make it up;
9) that the primary importance of material culture is not so much its practical
functions (to say that a chair is for sitting on tells us virtually nothing about
it) but its symbolic exchange values as part of the social constructions of
reality; and
10) that it is polysemous: the meaning of an artefact alters according to (i)
who uses it; (ii) where it is used, its social and material location; (iii) where
and in what circumstances the interpretation takes place; (iv) who does the
interpretation; (v) why they are bothering to interpret in the first place and in
relation to what expected audience [Shanks and Tilley 1989:34].
If the fruitfulness of a research program can be measured in terms of the number of interesting
studies undertaken in its infancy (as might be argued for the New Archaeology), then
contextual, hermeneutical programs show promise indeed. Recently Hodder has edited a
number of volumes of papers exploring the dimensions of the new domain of inquiry. In
Archaeology as Long-Term history (1987a), The Archaeology of Contextual Meanings
(1987b) and The Meaning of Things (1989c) (but especially in the latter) we see that the
influence of post-structuralist interpretative theory is already vibrant.
Archaeological Applications
But how put into practice a contextual research program? As Hodder pursues it, the key
is the elucidation of similarities and differences in the contexts of objects, design motifs, or
structures (1986, 1988, 1989a). As his program evolves we see Hodder becoming more
sophisticated in his application of 'post-structuralist' reasoning. In "This is Not an Article
About Material Culture as Text," he illustrates why we might think of certain changes in
material culture as representing meaning transformed from one social context to another (e.g.
of metals used at one time in dominance display, and at another time in utilitarian contexts
[1988]). This, says Hodder, suggests that, as with meaning in language, meaning in material
culture depends on the history of meaning. Each use of a sign refers to its historical use, its
intended use in the present context, and ultimately prefigures its future use. There will be
difficulties perceived in Hodder's new program. His optimism for success, no less than
Binford's for the New Archaeology program, must be tempered somewhat and the
epistemological limits examined as Wylie (1989b) suggests. There is an empirical realm and
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there are constraints operating on those who would seek to derive meaning from archaeological
contexts. The suggestion that material culture can only be understood in terms of textual
meanings is open to empirical verification. I would want to remind Hodder that artifacts can
have utilitarian functions that may be important perhaps before social meaning is applied (at
least, this too is an empirically verifiable assertion). I can see, however, that much of the
explanation of cultural variability and cultural change in the past must be built up from the
meaning of classes of artifacts and their relationships in space and time.
Archaeological inferences, whether based on a framework of cultural ecology or post-
modern textual analogies, are only as good as the premises on which they are based, and from
which their arguments proceed. A case in point is Botscharow's "Sites as Texts: an
Exploration of Mousterian Traces" (1989). Based on the assumption that flowers buried in the
vicinity of the Shanidar IV Neandertal were deliberately placed there during a burial ritual, she
concludes that this denotes social differentiation. I might be accused of special interest here,
but as I have pointed out (Gargett 1989), there may be no justification for the assumption that
flowers were placed with the corpse. The problem for contextual archaeology, no less than for
other research programs, is that it will depend on received knowledge built up by other
researchers. And inferences can be mistaken. This does not radically affect the value of
Hodder's and other's contextual program. It just makes it that much more important to take
account of the kinds of insights produced by the more mundane investigations of site
formation processes and the bridging arguments championed by Binford, Schiffer and others.
In assessing competing hypotheses as part of the process of building relatively accurate
knowledge (in a realist sense), all the available data need to be constantly evaluated for their
usefulness.
The introduction of post-structuralist interpretative theory to the study of archaeology
represents a significant addition to the culture concept, and as such can only enrich the
discipline. Still, there are those for whom these novel insights do not represent a significant
break with past archaeological practice; archaeology will only (they say) be a valuable social
practice when it becomes self-critical, and even revolutionary; when it becomes ideological
critique, not simply ideological reproduction. I now turn to these criticisms of archaeological
practice.
Socio-Political Critiques
Let's be clear: there is no discrimination against women in archaeology.
They are to be found in classrooms, in summer field schools, and as wives of
archaeologists. (The phrase male archaeologist is redundant.) Successful female
archaeologists (read married to an archaeologist) are employed in small
colleges, preferably female ones; in historical, classical, and even in
archaeological museums and laboratories. Frequently they do ethnohistorical
research. Usually, they help their husbands in the field.
Few females without predilections for marrying archaeologists are
attracted to field work crews. Mixed crews will continue to pose problems for
supervisors concerned with decorum until the status of Female Archaeologist
is redefined, although most geared-for-success female archaeology students need
little supervision in the field. They display domestic traits such as washing,
sorting, reconstructing, and cataloguing artifacts. To call these girls "camp
followers" as many informants do is unjust. They are fulfilling important
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ecological niches in the profession and, without them on summer digs and in
classrooms, it is doubtful that many archaeologists would get married - or
emafried. They would have to change their current wife-secuing procedures. It
is important here to recognize the functional-structural significance of the
summer feel cruise [Sellers 1973:146].
Though tongue-in-cheek, this excerpt from Sellers's guardedly critical 'ethnography' of
archaeology in the early 1970s serves as a paradigm for a genre of self-reflexive archaeological
literature that has as its purpose the drawing-together of empirical data to support a claim that
economics, politics and society subliminally influence the practice at all levels and in all
ways. This is an extension of the contextualist critique of science mentioned above, which
was one nail in the coffin of empiricism. When directed at a specific science, like archaeology,
a picture emerges of a discipline that, in naive unreflexive style, has been shaped by forces
that many would have thought (on an empiricist account once again) could not have had such
an effect. As one might expect, the critique originates in the disenfranchized segments of the
community, and there is no more peripheralized group in archaeology, especially in
British/North American practice, than women. Gero (1983, 1985) demonstrates that Sellers's
exposition has more than a grain of truth in it. Men do significantly more of the fieldwork,
and are more successful in getting grant money, than women. Men, she says, take their data
'raw', while women 'cook' their data. Women spend more of their time in museum study than
men. There is more than coincidence involved in this close parallel between the traditional role
of women in archaeology and in North American society at large. And, indeed, it seems as if
there is more than the usual bias against women at work in archaeology. Conkey and Spector
(1984) are more sweeping in their analysis than Gero. The litany of gender bias that they
expose is, for those of us who happen to be male, embarrassing to say the least. I would add
shameful. What is missing, the authors contend, is an explicit theory of human social life,
which would include a theory of how gender is constructed, maintained, and acquired. This lack
of a very sophisticated social theory in archaeology will be brought up again in the next
section. For my part, a gendered archaeology would be a more realistic archaeology, and the
removal of a focus on 'man [sic] the hunter' to the exclusion of the other half of humanity
would restore a little integrity to a discipline shamelessly rife with misogyny.
Of course, women are not the only members of the society to be injured by a non-
reflexive inquiry. Most archaeologists are white males. It's as simple as that. Non-whites have
traditionally been ignored or misrepresented in American 'historical' reconstructions (see for
example, Trigger 1980, 1989), and worldwide, from time to time, prehistoric reconstructions
have served to reinforce the dominant racist ideology (e.g. Hall 1984). Even European groups
such as the Shakers have been painted with a presentist brush, in the naive assumption that
what occurs today must necessarily have obtained in the past (this is an essentially Marxist
insight, and one that lends support to the thesis that theory of any kind is radically
ideological; for interesting case studies, see Leone 1981; Leone, Potter and Shackel 1987;
Meltzer 1981 [for a modern example], and Handsman 1980, 1981). As if that weren't enough,
Wobst and Keene (1983) point out an interesting artifact of "origins research" (of human
origins and of the origins of agriculture) and of regional tpologies. By their very nature, they
can be 'owned' by practitioners. This sets up quite a competition in the search for origins, and
creates lucrative power positions for the owners of the first anything. Those who 'own' the
biggest sites in a region own the typologies, and the rights of access, because their sites can
always be expected to contain the greatest diversity. I don't know if Wobst and Keene's rather
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cynical (though unfortunately true) account needs necessarily to be the case. A change of focus
could always undermine the framework (although I suspect the authors would argue that
someone would always work out a way to turn the situation to their advantage, and to acquire
and wield power as a result).
All this need not be the cause of a persistent pessimism about the ability of the
discipline to transcend these situations. Archaeologists until now have been noticeably
unreflexive, even while their siblings in anthropology have become almost cripplingly
reflexive. That the socio-political critique exists at all is a healthy sign, and if archaeologists
could get over the fear that they represent evidence that our production of knowledge is
radically relative, we might get beyond. Archaeology may be "fundamentally conditioned by
the larger society that supports it" (Gero 1985:342), and may be susceptible to the
naturalization of the present by imposing it on the past (Leone 1981:309), but as Wylie
(1985a) argues, by including in our source-side models for the past the reflexivity found
previously lacking, we should be able to avoid some of the pitfalls pinpointed by the socio-
political critique.
The Radical Critique
Total objectivity is not to be expected in human judgement, and the best we
can do is recognize and account for those subjective biases that we carry with
us [Deetz 1977:160].
A final break with empiricism, which was not forthcoming in the New Archaeology,
comes to archaeology through Marxist theory, structuralism and post-structuralism. The full-
blown, many-faceted explorations of archaeological practice represented by Shanks and Tilley's
Re-Constructing Archaeology (1987a) and Social Theory and Archaeology (1987b) were
presaged by other works by the pair (notably 1982), and in the work of anthropologists and
sociologists from the continent. Critical theory, the application of Marxist insights to practice
in academe, had been an active part of intellectual life on the continent since the 1920s.
Shanks and Tilley, however, have brought the full force of Critical theory to bear on
archaeology as it has been practiced by Westerners, at least, since before the break with
tradition represented in the New Archaeology. It is impossible either to synopsize their wide-
ranging criticisms, or to even begin to be critical of them in this presentation. But perhaps I
can devote some time to their motivation and to what they see as a worthwhile archaeology.
Shanks and Tilley (1989) encapsulating their two monographs in "Archaeology into the
1990s" wanted to criticize, first of all, naturalism, scientism, phenomenalism and empiricism.
They wanted to counterpose naturalism (i.e. making social life a second nature) with meaning
in culture and individual agency. They wanted to stress the creation of 'facts', to characterize
theory as practice (and archaeology as theoretical practice). And, contra positivism, they
introduce Critical theory, and interpretative theory (hermeneutics). They wanted to examine
'meta-theoretical' issues such as value-freedom and the politics of theory. Finally, they were
engaged in pointing out "the object of archaeology - the relationship between contextually
situated social practice and material culture" (Shanks and Tilley 1989:3). This study of the
past would require "self-reflexive discourse," and this would be "a process in which [signs
from the past] ... are written into the present" (Shanks and Tilley 1989:4). This would be an
empirically based enterprise "involving both resistance (the material record does constrain what
we can write in various ways) and transformation (the movement from things to words) ... [by
moving] from a material culture 'text' to an archaeological text backing up our arguments and
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statements by 'quoting' with artefacts" (Shanks and Tilley 1989:4). Shanks and Tilley
(1989:7) advocate "the full realization of archaeology as a strategic intervention in the present
through a focus on (i) archaeology itself as a micropolitical field; (ii) an adequate theorization
of the relation between material culture and social structures both within contemporary society
and in the past; (iii) using the difference of the past to challenge established economic and
social strategies, categorizations, epistemologies, rationalities, modes of living, and relating
to others." This is calculated to move archaeology from the category of ideological
reproduction and into the realm of praxis.
Reviews of Shanks and Tilley range from acceptance through qualified approval to
unmitigated disapproval. But from reactions to their work will come, I think, a better
understanding of what they intended in their highly stylized and polemic brace of monographs.
Already, having been asked to summarize their work in the Norwegian Archaeological
Review, Shanks and Tilley have toned down their provocative language, and in more succinct
style presented the outlines of their case (1989). Reactions from Kristiansen (1988), and the
commentators in the Norwegian Archaeological Review raise many important points that will
generate further clarification of their program. Traditionalists will have their say, though I
daresay, not with anything like the reasoned, seasoned clarity or balance of someone who is
already steeped in the traditions out of which Shanks and Tilley emerged. As an example,
Earle and Preucel (1987) took the Radical Critique to task and argued that (as seems in some
sense to be the case) the Radical Critique of archaeology was a critique of the New
Archaeology. The authors preferred, in the end, to name a new archaeology as "behavioral"
but, unlike the behavioral archaeology of Schiffer (1976), theirs would include structuralism,
decision-making, and would somehow better account for material culture patterning. It does
not, however, include a discussion of post-structuralism which, I am afraid, renders almost any
discussion of aims and goals, epistemologies and ontologies that lack such consideration,
passe.
This has been an, admittedly, curt treatment of the Radical Critique of archaeology.
Thus far it has been conducted in the main by two committed and vocal archaeologists who
see as their mission the re-construction of archaeology. I would rather give them space to do
so, since they have marshalled so much evidence that archaeology is in need of a refit. Their
imprint on the field has only just been felt. And no doubt further reflection and study,
combined with attempts to make their program applicable to the real material of the past (as
represented in the present), will render archaeology a more interesting, and in the words of
Shennan (1986), more important, endeavor than heretofore.
Real Archaeology
In the preceding I have attempted to present the flavor of current archaeological research
programs, by way of illuminating their essentially scientific nature. None appeal to
unempirical domains, and in seeking the unobservable processes structuring the observable
they are not eschewing an empirically based science, only one that adheres to a narrow
empiricist account of knowledge and its production. Nothing about these programs is
inherently unscientific, and although scientism has justifiably been criticized (as for example
in Harding [1986]), science has not, and I think should not be seen as pernicious. Our ability
to pierce the mystifications of ideology by reference to empirical observation (in the Marxist
and socio-political critique) is one proof, for me, of the value of intersubjectivity and
verification of knowledge claims, the foundation of scientific reasoning. In what follows, I
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hope to present what archaeologists, as scientists, really do when they attempt to produce
knowledge of the past. I will assume that a realist account of science is the best that we have
at the moment, and I will address the twin issues of objectivity and verification that have so
plagued the discipline of late. Much of the polemical debate about the value of various
research programs has centered on the ability of practitioners to achieve a level of objectivity
in what they do. The shading of these debates suggests that there is some worth in the
ambition of objectivity, but what it is and how it is to be achieved are not straightforward, to
say the least.
In "Data, Relativism, and Archaeological Science" (1987) Binford is at his most
arrogant and his most philosophically naive. His argument, drawn out, is that empirical
claims for cultural relativism, which inform the textual/contextual research program, render
these programs radically unscientific. As he sees it, 'empiricism' is at fault, because it
privileges experience, and experience is hopelessly grounded in an individual's cultural
experience. If anything, however, it is Binford's own empiricism that disallows him from
sorting out what is an empirical question from an epistemological one. As Wylie (1989a)
notes, whether, and to what extent human groups can be seen as manifesting universal
processes (as opposed to radically idiosyncratic ones) is an empirical problem, not something
to be asserted or assumed. The epistemological question that Binford seeks, rightly, to answer,
but fails to come to realize, is one of obtaining his hoped-for 'objectivity'. On his narrow
account of 'objectivity' (basically an agreed-upon observation language [1987:392]), he will
always be frustrated, since on his account humans are doomed to experience-near
understanding, and are unable therefore, to understand alien cultures or the past in anything but
the experience-near understanding of the "other's" culture or the past. This is clearly not the
case, or there could be no shared understanding between people or between cultures, and there
would be no opportunity for the success that science has had in understanding human behavior
or physical phenomena. We are not mired in our own experience, as Binford asserts. In
recognizing that experience shades our understanding, we do not preclude science or scientific
knowledge (just those things that Binford cherishes). Indeed, the recognition that culture is
meaningfully constituted, and that knowledge is to a great extent contextually based imposes
constraints on scientific knowledge that simply cannot be argued away.
Binford's argument thus fails at a very basic level, because he misunderstands the
problem. It is not the problem of science versus non-science (or 'empiricism' versus Binford's
'objectivism') that plagues him - that through a recognition of the culturally constructed
nature of meaning all knowledge is rendered radically context-dependent and therefore
unscientific, and the textual or contextual program anarchic. Rather, it is Binford's mistaking
the empirical question for an epistemological one that haunts him; it is a phantom of his
philosophical nalvet6, coupled with his zeal for secure knowledge that makes him see
problems where really none exist. If not radically relativist, nor ideally objective, what, then,
is a science like archaeology? How does it manage to produce, tentatively, a view of the past
that seems to approximate what actually took place? I follow Wylie's (1989a) analysis of
archaeological practice. She describes a process of reasoning that is every bit as complicated as
Shanks and Tilley's "four-fold hermeneutic" (1987a: 107), but she manages to make it stand as
a model of practice that actually demonsaes why archaeology, and social science in general,
can escape accusations of radical relativism which would call into question any and all
accounts of the past
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Wylie's analogy of cables and tacking captures some of the complexity of reasoning
involved when archaeological phenomena are made sensible. It is a far cry from the formal
logic of the positivists, or from the characterization of hypothesis testing as a linear process
of instantiation of a theoretical construct. For Bernstein scientific arguments are "more like
cables than chains," in which
researchers ... do not (indeed, cannot) proceed by 'a linear movement from
premises to conclusions or from individual "facts" to generalizations'; they
must exploit 'multiple strands and diverse types of evidence, data, hunches, and
arguments to [assess and, ultimately, to] support a scientific hypotheses [sic]
or theory' (Bernstein 1983:69). ... even where there is no single
commensurating ground for judgement, 'the cumulative weight of [disparate,
multidimensional considerations of] evidence, data, reasons, and arguments can
be rationally decisive' (1983:74). Extreme relativism in which there are no
grounds for choice between alternatives - in which 'anything goes', taken on
its own terms - does not follow from the fact that no one set of
considerations is fundamental across the board, no one strand of argument
conclusive [Wylie 1989a:7].
Where the possibility of incommensurability arises, as it can in coming to understand an alien
culture (living, or archaeological), Wylie, after Bemstein again (and remembering Geertz),
shows "how anthropologists actually do (or can) avoid the pitfalls of taking either their own
framework or that of their subjects as foundational" (Wylie 1989a:8). Geertz advises that
"anthropologists must grasp the system of 'experience-near' concepts in terms of which
members of a culture ordinarily understand and represent their own actions, beliefs, and
concepts, concepts that are not necessarily familiar to the people being studied but that ...
make intelligible the symbolic forms [of their culture]' (Bernstein 1983:95)" (Wylie 1989a:8).
Understanding of one's own and the other's culture is to be accomplished through a
'process of dialectical tackdng back and forth'.
On Geertz's account, tacking operates between 'our' distant - theoretical,
abstract - concepts and 'their' [meaning the 'other'] concrete, experience-
embedded concepts.... a movement between ' "parts" and the "whole" '
(Bernstein 1983:133), and requires a 'dialectical interplay between our own
preunderstandings and the forms of life that we are seeking to understand'
(1983:173). Taken together, cross-context understanding is conceived as, in
effect, a diagonal tack, where the dimensions traversed are, on one hand,
abstract:concrete and, on the other, familiar: alien [Wylie 1989a:8].
The complexity does not end there, however. Wylie adds "some form  of 'dialectical tacking'
on a vertical axis within our own context" to produce "our own experience-distant concepts"
(Wylie 1989a'8). These make our own experience intelligible, and to be understood, we need
to know more about our "experience-near concepts and practices, the 'preunderstandings', that
constitute [our] context" [Wyie 1989a:9].
These are vitally important analogs of practice for archaeology, since we are dealing, in
the main, with a subject that literally does not exist, one of which we cannot be sure if it is
commensurate with our own context. As Wylie adds
Whatever its specific aims, archaeological interpretation depends on
background knowledge of contemporary contexts; usually it proceeds by means
of ethnographic analogy. It is therefore explicitly and heavily dependent on
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vertical tack arguments within the source context (broadly construed) which
produce both experience-distant concepts - generally theories about cultural
development, differentiation, interaction, and adaptation - and experience-near
models of specific past contexts.... Archaeological inquiry also exploits a
diagonal tack from our interpretive concepts to the observable, material
consequences of past practices [Wylie 1989a: 1].
In the remainder of the analysis, Wylie shows how archaeologists have managed to
accomplish all of this through the use of examples drawn from the literature.
The foregoing is not intended as a blueprint of practice [by me or by Wylie]; it is,
however, intended to illustrate just how complex scientific reasoning is, contra Binford (1987)
and others, whose construals of science are usually unidimensional, involving the simple
confrontation of hypotheses with data. In other works, to demonstrate the heretofore
unacknowledged complexity of archaeological reasoning, Wylie has examined the use of
analogy, its increasingly sophisticated use as a source of explanatory hypotheses, and its
epistemic legitimacy on a realist account of science (Wylie 1982a, 1985b). These were
undertaken to right the erroneous 'rejection' of analogical argument in archaeology, based on a
(once more) misunderstanding of the real form of reasoning employed by science.
Testing, on Wylie's model, involves a Collingwood style 'question and answer' where
"evidence is sought that is specifically relevant to the question whether it is likely that a
particular past context instantiated the reconstructive models archaeologists bring to it"
(1989a: 14). This, she goes on to demonstrate, can be (has been) successful in limiting what
can be claimed about the past context.
In all cases, however, interpretive conclusions depend on various lines of
argument developed on vertical and horizontal tacks in both source and subject
contexts. And, in this, their strength derives not just from the diversity of
their support but, more specifically, from the fact that the constituent strands
draw on different ranges of background knowledge in the interpretation of
different dimensions of the archaeological record; they are compelling taken
together because it is highly implausible that they could all incorporate
compensatory errors [Wylie 1989a 15].
Thus, against a "nihilist relativism" Wylie places her "mitigated" objectivism.
The message to be taken home in all of this should be comforting to adherents of the
current diverse archaeological research programs, New Archaeologists, Marxists and
contextualists alike. First off, Wylie's argument concludes that
theoretical commitments [like eco-determinism and Marxism] do not
monolithically control both the interpretation of archaeological data as
evidence and the generation of reconstructive hypotheses which the data as
evidence might be expected to test. In any given reconstructive-evaluative
argument, it will be necessary to exploit a range of different, independent
sources to accomplish these diverse tasks [tacking on four dimensions]. It is
the independence of sources, and therefore of the constituent arguments about
evidential significance, which ensure that the strands of the resulting cables are
not just mutually reinforcing but are also, and crucially, mutually constraining
[Wylie 1989a:16].
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Secondly, although our experience teaches us to see what "our theoretical commitments
prepare us to see," that need not render radically relative all that we know or can know of the
archaeological past.
our presuppositions, theoretical or otherwise, are not all-pervasive. We
frequently fmd out that we were wrong, that the data resist any interpretation
that will make them consistent with our expectations, and that we are dealing
with a subject (cultural or otherwise) which is very different from anything
with which we are familiar. We are then forced by the evidence to consider
completely different interpretive possibilities than we have entertained in the
past, and even to rethink deep-seated orienting presuppositions about the
nature of cultunal phenomena [Wylie 1989a: 16].
The empiricist yearning for "context-independent, 'objective' knowledge" is asserted to be
unattainable. But as Wylie has shown, "it is also not the case that data are entirely plastic,
that they are so theory-permeated that facts can be constituted at will in whatever form a
contextually appealing theory requires." Instead,
researchers routinely exploit this capacity for resistance on a number of
dimensions: in the processes of vertical tacking within our source context(s)
by which the theories and background knowledge about determining structures
are built up and tested, and in those of diagonal tacking which seek evidence
that these structures were (or were not) instantiated in particular past contexts"
[Wylie 1989a:16].
Wylie's argument would also seem to undermine the Marxist contention that all theory
is "shaped by society and ... [influences] society in particular directions (the 'materialist'
thesis)" (Saitta 1983:301). According to this, theoretical truths are relative truths, grounded in
the dominant class of a society, and only serve to reinforce the dominant ideology. If this is
so, there would (on a realist account) be no scientific knowledge, nor any knowledge of the
real world tha more or less accurately describes it. Our understanding of the world would be
no more sophisticated than it was in the Middle Ages, when the sun was believed to orbit the
earth, and the earth itself was flat. To argue, as Marx and others have, that theory is ideology,
is to, once again, misrepresent the actual practice of scientific reasoning and the hope for a
'mitigated objectivity' in the production of knowledge (it also, ironically, undermines [as does
any claim of a radical relativism] their own thesis). At least, if one accepts Wylie's account of
anthrpological and archaeological science, there is reason to doubt that knowledge is radically
context-dependent, and that knowledge is purely produced in the interest of a dominant class.
The Future
By presenting Wylie's philosophical analysis of the science of archaeology in such
detail, I have highlighted the complexity of reasoning involved when we 'do archaeology'. Old
notions of science as an essentially linear process of hypothesis, test, and reformulation of
hypothesis were overly simple, and obscured what really happens when we go about
constructing the past from the present phenomenon of the archaeological record. As I stated at
the beginning, theoretical fiameworks and research programs are ultimately context-dependent,
and thus are subject to change. But what really constitutes scientific practice is perennial, and
for the moment at least, Wylie has provided us with a much more realistic view of what
comprises the scientific endeavor in archaeology than that to which we have previously had
access.
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So for the future, I would expect that archaeologists will continue to struggle with their
arguments of relevancy (middle range research) and with the difficulty of multi-dimensional
tacking to acquire knowledge of past cultural contexts that are, if nothing else, temporally
distant and difficult to apprehend using the material remains and their spatial and temporal
relationships (all we really have to work with). I am optimistic that the disagreements over
what science is and how we do it will subside, as more and more archaeologists are brought to
an understanding of scientific practice that at least matches Wylie's account in its complexity.
And, as Trigger (1989) implies, emphasis on extreme relativist and extreme objectivist
positions will wane, and the insights of Marxism will continue to yield fruit in studies of
human history.
I said at the outset that the habit of calling each research program a different kind of
archaeology is damaging. I hope I have brought out, in the discussions of 'postprocessual'
research programs, the notion that there are many aims and goals in archaeology, not many
archaeologies. This is not just semantic quibbling on my part. The practice of naming 'other'
archaeologies is, at bottom, political or at least polemical. And in so naming each program as
'this' or 'that' archaeology, the practitioners are acting to distance themselves from one
another; a kind of intellectual quarantine. This divisiveness is not only visible in the debate
between the old-line empiricists like Binford and the contextualists like Hodder and Tilley, it
can be seen in arguments between different kinds of materialists, and between different kinds of
structuralists. This demonstrates, probably more than we would like to admit, a characteristic
in most of us, that of taking a position and defending it. This aspect of the social context of
archaeological science, more than any disagreement over what happens to be (or not to be) the
'proper study of humankind', more than any dispute about what is or is not scientific,
threatens to turn the field into a cacophony of shrill voices, and will inevitably lead to a
disaffection of the majority for the vocal minority. I have to hope that there are enough
earnest people in archaeology today with the energy and the motivation to eschew intellectual
posturing and examine the numerous research programs for what they are - worthwhile
sources for explanatory models and analogies to enable theory-building, employing the
complex reasoning alluded to by Wylie (1989a). And what is needed more than anything else,
it seems to me, is a conciliatory attitude among the various proponents - a desire to really
improve, rather than simply to tear down, what archaeology has thus far contributed to the
understanding of the past and of ourselves. This will not be an easy task.
Acknowledgements
I wish to acknowledge the role of my teachers at the University of Califomia at Berkeley. I credit
them with motivating me to come to grips with theoretical matters, and to begin to comprehend
what it is that underpins the production of archaeological knowledge. If the reader discovers any
useful insights in this work, they may be as much the property of colleagues as they are original
with me, such are the vicissitudes of collegiality. I apologize if I have unwittingly paraphrased
someone else's utterances, or worse, perverted their thinking through my presentation. Any
misrepresentations are entirely mine. Margaret W. Conkey, Diane Gifford-Gonzalez, F. Clarke
Howell, and Alison Wylie all, in one way or another, encouraged me to submnit this manuscript to
the Kroeber Anthropological Society. Finally, let me thank the Regents of the University of
California, whose "encouragement" has allowed me to study and learn at UC Berkeley, almost
without pecuniary anxieties, during my tenure as a Regents Fellow.
142
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What is Archaeology?
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