Archaeological theory

Archaeological theoryrefers to the various intellectual frameworks through whicharchaeologistsinterpret archaeological data. Archaeological theory functions as the application ofphilosophy of scienceto archaeology, and is occasionally referred to asphilosophy of archaeology.There is no one singular theory of archaeology, but many, with different archaeologists believing that information should be interpreted in different ways. Throughout the history of the discipline, various trends of support for certain archaeological theories have emerged, peaked, and in some cases died out. Different archaeological theories differ on what the goals of the discipline are and how they can be achieved.

Some archaeological theories, such asprocessual archaeology,holds that archaeologists are able to develop accurate,objectiveinformation about past societies by applying thescientific methodto their investigations, whilst others, such aspost-processual archaeology,dispute this, and claim all archaeological data is tainted by human interpretation and social factors, and any interpretation they make about past societies is thereforesubjective.

Other archaeological theories, such asMarxist archaeology,instead interpret archaeological evidence within a framework for how its proponents believe society operates. Marxist archaeologists in general believe that the bipolarism that exists between the processual and post-processual debates is an opposition inherent within knowledge production and is in accord with a dialectical understanding of the world. Many Marxist archaeologists believe that it is this polarism within the anthropological discipline (and all academic disciplines) that fuels the questions that spur progress in archaeological theory and knowledge. This constant interfacing and conflict between the extremes of the two heuristic playing grounds (subjective vs. objective) is believed to result in a continuous reconstruction of the past by scholars.

Background

Since the early 20th century, most accounts of archaeological methodology have accepted the data that is uncovered by the archaeologist is subsequently interpreted through a theoretical viewpoint.Nevertheless, the archaeological community is divided over the extent to which theory pervades the discipline. On one side, there are those who believe that certain archaeological techniques – such as excavation or recording – are neutral and outside of the bounds of theory, while on the other are those who believe that these too are also influenced by theoretical considerations.ArchaeologistIan Hodder,a prominent advocate of the latter view, criticised the alternate approach by highlighting that methodological decisions, such as where to open a trench, how diligently to excavate a stratigraphic layer and whether to keep every artefact discovered, are all based on prior theoretical interpretations of the site, and that even excavatory techniques could not therefore escape the realm of theory.Those who take the former approach have sometimes tried to separate the raw data from the theoretical interpretations in their publications, but have come under criticism from those, such as Hodder, who argue that theoretical interpretation pervades the entire archaeological methodology, and therefore cannot be separated from the raw data.

Archaeologists such as Matthew Johnson have argued that most, if not all, aspects of archaeology are informed by theoretical considerations.

In his overview of archaeological theory, the archaeologist Matthew Johnson of theUniversity of Southamptonput forward four arguments for why theory was so important to the archaeological discipline, and therefore why all archaeologists should learn about the subject. First, he noted that all of the arguments for why archaeology benefited society were based in theory, and that archaeologists wanting to defend their discipline from its critics would therefore require a grounding in theory.Second, he highlighted that theory was required to compare two different interpretations of the past and decide which one was the more likely.Third, he asserted that theory was needed for the archaeologist to accept and admit to their own personal biases and agendas in interpreting the material evidence.Finally, Johnson put forward what he considered to be the most important reason for the necessity of understanding theory; that all archaeologists, as human beings, are innately theoretical, in that they naturally make use of "theories, concepts, ideas, assumptions" in their work. As such, he asserts that any archaeologist claiming to be "atheoretical" is mistaken, and that in actuality they cloud their own theoretical position under such jargon as "common sense". He proceeded to suggest that most of those western archaeologists who claim to eschew theory in favour of a "common sense" approach were actually exhibiting culturalmachismoby playing on the stereotype that intelligent discussions and debates wereeffeminateand therefore of lesser value.

Archaeological theories

Antiquarianism ( "antiquities collection" ) and Imperial synthesis (Prehistory to c. 1880)

People's interest of the past has existed since antiquity. During the Western world's Medieval period six main concepts were formed that would come to influence archaeological theory to some degree

1. The world is of recent, supernatural origin at best no more than a few thousand years old
2. The physical world has degraded since God's original creation
3. Humanity was created in the Garden of Eden
4. Standards of human conduct naturally degrade
5. History of the world is a sequence of unique events
6. Culturally, socially, and intellectually the people of the past were identical to the present

The coming of the Renaissance stimulated an interest in the past but it was more on the level of collecting artifacts and romanticized theories of their origin. It was not until the 19th century the first elements of actual systematic study of older civilizations began but they tended to be designed to support imperial nationalism.

Cultural-historical (or "historical particularism," "national archaeology" ) archaeology (c. 1860 - present)

Developments in the 19th century withHuttonandLyell's theory ofuniformitarianismandDarwin's theory ofnatural selectionset the stage for the modern scientific investigation into the origin of humanity.

After Darwin came a mode of archaeology known ascultural, or culture history,according to which sites are grouped into distinct "cultures" to determine the geographic spread and time span of these cultures and to reconstruct the interactions and flow of ideas between them. Cultural history, as the name suggests, was closely allied with the science ofhistory.Cultural historians employed thenormative model of culture,the principle that each culture is a set of norms governing human behaviour. Thus, cultures can be distinguished by patterns of craftsmanship; for instance, if one excavatedsherdof pottery is decorated with a triangular pattern, and another sherd with a chequered pattern, they likely belong to different cultures. Such an approach naturally leads to a view of the past as a collection of different populations, classified by their differences and by their influences on each other. Changes in behaviour could be explained bydiffusionwhereby new ideas moved, through social and economic ties, from one culture to another.

The Australian archaeologistVere Gordon Childewas one of the first to explore and expand this concept of the relationships between cultures especially in the context of prehistoric Europe. By the 1920s sufficient archaeological material had been excavated and studied to suggest that diffusionism was not the only mechanism through which change occurred. Influenced by the political upheaval of the inter-war period Childe then argued thatrevolutionshad wrought major changes in past societies. He conjectured aNeolithic Revolution,which inspired people to settle and farm rather than hunt nomadically. This would have led to considerable changes in social organisation, which Childe argued led to a secondUrban Revolutionthat created the firstcities.Such macro-scale thinking was in itself revolutionary and Childe's ideas are still widely admired and respected.

Historical particularism (c. 1880 - 1940)

Franz Boasargued that cultures were unique entities shaped by a unique sequence of events. As a result, there was no universal standard by which one culture could be compared with another. This line of thought combined withJohn Lubbock's concept that Western civilization would overwhelm and eventually destroy primitive cultures resulted in anthropologists recording mountains of information on primitive peoples before they vanished.

National archaeology (c. 1916 - present)

National archaeology used cultural-historical concepts to instill pride and raise the morale of certain nationalities or racial groups and in many countries it remains the dominant method of archaeology.

Soviet archaeology (1917 - present)

Adapting some of the concepts of Darwiniannatural selectionfor use outside of the discipline of evolutionary biology while employing the Marxist historical-economic theory ofdialectical materialism,Soviet archaeologists resumed the method of use-wear analysis and, beginning in the 1930s, tried to explain observed changes in the archaeological record in terms of internalsocial dynamics.

Processual archaeology ( "New Archaeology" )

In the 1960s, a number of young, primarily American archaeologists, such asLewis Binford,rebelled against the paradigms of cultural history. They proposed a "New Archaeology", which would be more "scientific" and "anthropological". They came to see culture as a set of behavioural processes and traditions. (In time, this view gave rise to the termprocessual archaeology). Processualists borrowed from theexact sciencesthe idea ofhypothesistesting and thescientific method.They believed that an archaeologist should develop one or more hypotheses about a culture under study, and conduct excavations with the intention of testing these hypotheses against fresh evidence. They had also become frustrated with the older generation's teachings through whichcultureshad taken precedence over the people being studied themselves. It was becoming clear, largely through the evidence of anthropology, thatethnic groupsand their development were not always entirely congruent with the cultures in thearchaeological record.

Behavioural archaeology

An approach to the study of archaeological materials formulated byMichael B. Schifferin the mid-1970s that privileged the analysis ofhuman behaviourand individual actions, especially in terms of the making, using, and disposal ofmaterial culture.In particular this focused on observing and understanding what people actually did, while refraining from considering people's thoughts and intentions in explaining that behaviour. A related area isHuman behavioral ecology,which models material traces of human behaviour in terms of adaptations and optimisations.

Post-processual archaeology

In the 1980s, a new movement arose led by the British archaeologistsMichael Shanks,Christopher Tilley,Daniel MillerandIan Hodder.It questioned processualism's appeal to science and impartiality by claiming that every archaeologist is in fact biased by their personal experience and background, and thus truly scientific archaeological work is difficult or impossible. This is especially true in archaeology where experiments (excavations) cannot possibly be repeatable by others as thescientific methoddictates. Exponents of this relativistic method, calledpost-processual archaeology,analysed not only the material remains they excavated, but also themselves, their attitudes and opinions. The different approaches to archaeological evidence which every person brings to his or her interpretation result in differentconstructsof the past for each individual. The benefit of this approach has been recognised in such fields as visitor interpretation, cultural resource management and ethics in archaeology as well as fieldwork. It has also been seen to have parallels with culture history. Processualists critique it, however, as without scientific merit. They point out that analysing yourself doesn't make a hypothesis any more valid, since a scientist will likely be more biased about himself than about artifacts. And even if you can't perfectly replicate digs, one should try to follow science as rigorously as possible. After all, perfectly scientific experiments can be performed on artifacts recovered or system theories constructed from dig information.

Post-processualism provided an umbrella for all those who decried the processual model of culture, which many feminist and neo-Marxist archaeologists for example believed treated people as mindless automatons and ignored their individuality.

Current theories

After the turn of the millennium archaeological theory began to take on new directions by returning to the objects of archaeological study. Archaeologists, led byLaurent Olivier,Bjørnar Olsen,Michael Shanks,andChristopher Witmore,argued for taking things seriously not only as mediators in what can be said about the past, but also in terms of the unique ways they hold on to actions, events, or changes. For them, archaeology is less the study of the past through its material remains, than the study of things themselves with an aim to generate diverse pasts in the present. (Many archaeologists refer to this movement assymmetrical archaeology,asserting an intellectual kinship with the work ofBruno Latourand others).

Global scope

This divergence of archaeological theory has not progressed identically in all parts of the world where archaeology is conducted or in the many sub-fields of the discipline. Traditional heritage attractions often retain an ostensibly straightforward Culture History element in their interpretation material whilst university archaeology departments provide an environment to explore more abstruse methods of understanding and explaining the past. Australian archaeologists, and many others who work with indigenous peoples whose ideas of heritage differ from western concepts, have embraced post-processualism. Professional archaeologists in the United States however are predominantly processualist[1]and this last approach is common in other countries where commercialCultural Resources Managementis practised.

Development

In 1973,David ClarkeofCambridge Universitypublished anacademic paperinAntiquityclaiming that as a discipline, archaeology had moved from its original "noble innocence" through to "self-consciousness" and then onto "critical self-consciousness", a symptom of which was the increasing recognition and emphasis on archaeological theory. As a result, he argued, archaeology had suffered a "loss of innocence" as archaeologists became sceptical of the work of their forebears.

The impact of ideology

Archaeology has been and remains a cultural, gender and political battlefield. Many groups have tried to use archaeology to prove some current cultural or political point.Marxistor Marxist-influenced archaeologists in theUSSRand theUK(among others) often try to prove the truth ofdialectical materialismor to highlight the past (and present) role of conflict between interest groups (e.g. male vs. female, elders vs. juniors, workers vs. owners) in generating social change. Some contemporary cultural groups have tried, with varying degrees of success, to use archaeology to prove their historic right to ownership of an area of land. Many schools of archaeology have been patriarchal, assuming that in prehistory men produced most of the food by hunting, and women produced little nutrition by gathering; more recent studies have exposed the inadequacy of many of these theories. Non-white cultural groups and experiences of racism in the past are under-represented in the archaeological literature.Some used the "Great Ages" theory implicit in thethree-age systemto argue continuous upward progress by Western civilisation. Much contemporary archaeology is influenced by neo-Darwinian evolutionary thought,phenomenology,postmodernism,agency theory,cognitive science,functionalism,gender-basedandFeminist archaeologyandSystems theory.

References

Bibliography

Academic books

• Díaz-Andreu, M. (2020). Towards Archaeological Theory: a history. InThe Power of Reason, the Matter of Prehistory. Papers in Honour of Antonio Gilman Guillén,Edited by P. Díaz-del-Río et al., pp. 41-53. CSIC.
• Harris, O.J.T. and C.N. Cipolla. (2017).Archaeological Theory at the Millennium: Introducing Current Perspectives.Routledge, London.
• Hodder, Ian. (1991). Postprocessual Archaeology and the Current Debate. InProcessual and Post-Processual Archaeologies: Multiple Ways of Knowing the Past,Edited by R. Preucel, pp. 30–41. CAI Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, Occasional Paper No. 10.
• Hodder, Ian (1999).The Archaeological Process: An Introduction.Oxford: Blackwell.ISBN978-0631198857.
• Hodder, Ian; Hutson, Scott (2003).Reading the Past: Current Approaches to Interpretation in Archaeology(third edition).New York: Cambridge University Press.ISBN978-0521528849.
• Izquierdo-Egea, Pascual (2012).Economic Archaeology of Grave Goods.Advances in Archaeology1,ISSN2254-187X.Graus.ISBN978-84-939589-1-6.
• Johnson, Matthew (2010).Archaeological Theory: An Introduction(second edition).Oxford: Blackwell.ISBN978-1405100144.
• McGuire, Randall H. (1992).A Marxist Archaeology.Academic Press, Inc, New York.
• McGuire, Randal H. (2008).Archaeology as Political Action.University of California Press, Berkeley.
• Olsen, B., M. Shanks, T. Webmoor, and C. Witmore. (2012)Archaeology. The Discipline of Things.University of California Press, Berkeley.
• Praetzellis, A. (2000).Death by Theory: A Tale of Mystery and Archaeological Theory.AltaMira Press.[2]
• Trigger, Bruce G. (2007).A History of Archaeological Thought(Second Edition). New York: Cambridge University Press.

Academic papers

• Clarke, David (1973). "Archaeology: the loss of innocence".Antiquity.47(185): 6–18.doi:10.1017/S0003598X0003461X.S2CID34438511.