Archaeological Theory in Practice

Patricia Urban, Edward Schortman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000021172
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

Many students view archaeological theory as a subject distinct from field research. This division is reinforced by the way theory is taught, often in stand-alone courses that focus more on logic and reasoning than on the application of ideas to fieldwork. Divorcing thought from action does not convey how archaeologists go about understanding the past.

This book bridges the gap between theory and practice by looking in detail at how the authors and their colleagues used theory to interpret what they found while conducting research in northwest Honduras. This is not a linear narrative. Rather, the book highlights the open-ended nature of archaeological investigations in which theories guide research whose findings may challenge these initial interpretations and lead in unexpected directions. Pursuing those novel investigations requires new theories that are themselves subject to refutation by newly gathered data. The central case study is the writers' work in Honduras. The interrelations of fieldwork, data, theory, and interpretation are also illustrated with two long-running archaeological debates, the emergence of inequality in southern Mesopotamia and inferring the ancient meanings of Stonehenge.

The book is of special interest to undergraduate Anthropology/Archaeology majors and first- and second-year graduate students, along with anyone interested in how archaeologists convert the static materials we find into dynamic histories of long-vanished people.

1 Explanation, Theory, and the Social Sciences

It was March 5, 1988 and very hot. We were working on a drawing at the site of La Sierra in the Naco valley, northwestern Honduras. Things were not going well. We were trying to capture in 2-D, on graph paper, a complex set of 3-D relationships: the vertical connections among a sequence of walls, floors, and earth layers. This set of constructed and natural features resulted from the extensive remodeling of a rather large building that took place between AD 600–800. The structure was winning. In the midst of this ongoing battle with heat, humidity, and stratigraphy, one of our undergraduate colleagues burst through the brush and thrust forward several fragments of white material that had just been unearthed in the excavations he was directing nearby. “What is this stuff?” he asked. Wiping sweat from our brows, and sunblock into our eyes, we were very surprised to find him holding fragments of conch shell. The most likely source of this material is the Caribbean, at least 35 km straight-line distance from La Sierra across rugged mountains. Nothing like this had ever been found in the Naco Valley before and, more to the point, we never expected to retrieve imported, exotic shells. The Naco Valley is, after all, an interior basin, not a coastal plain. After saying something useful like, “You found shells?” we struggled to make sense of the materials. What our colleague held—seashells—was clear enough, but what they meant was a mystery. Little did we think, as we stood there perspiring and furrowing our brows, that our whole view of Naco Valley prehistory was about to change.

How could a handful of marine shells have such a major impact? And, even allowing for the adverse effects of heat on mental processes, why did two professional archaeologists have so much trouble grasping the significance of what they were seeing? Addressing these very reasonable questions and understanding our confusion requires braving the realm of ideas. We need to look at the preconceived notions that we carry into the field and use to make sense of what we find. By themselves, there was nothing particularly odd or outstanding about those bits of shell. Instead, their significance derived from their unanticipated presence at this particular place and dating to a specific period in the past. The conjunction of objects, place, time, and our expectations concerning all three variables made them important. Trying to explain those shells would lead us in directions we had not anticipated going before that March morning.

Explanation

This book is about how archaeologists write history as we explain what we find. What is an “explanation”? Explanation consists of a collection of statements intended to identify the causes and consequences of a set of observations. Explanations answer the question of why something happened as it is observed to have occurred. Explanations also generate new knowledge by drawing attention to connections among what might otherwise seem to be unrelated pieces of evidence.

Inference to the Best Explanation

Explanation is something we all engage in every day. We will argue that explanations in archaeology and in our daily encounters with reality take the form of inference to the best explanation, a kind of inductive reasoning. Inference to the best explanation describes an argument that accounts for a sample of observations by referring to premises that are plausible but not proven to be true. It also presupposes that these observations can be explained by multiple distinct propositions; among these it is possible to choose one as the most likely to be correct. The best explanation is the one that is most compelling as measured by its:

• Generality, or ability to account for a greater quantity and diversity of the available evidence than its rivals while not being contradicted by any observations;
• Relative simplicity, that is, the argument that makes the fewest assumptions about the evidence at hand is the best, all else being equal;
• Refutability, the explanation is phrased in ways that it can be proven wrong;
• Expandability, the explanation has the capacity to account for evidence gathered after it has been proposed.

For example, you walk into your dorm room after a weekend away and find the floor strewn with pizza boxes, pizza crusts, and crushed beer cans. How do you explain this pattern of observations? Your roommate, Erin, argues that a group of strangers arrived, broke into the room while s/he was sleeping, tossed their trash all over the floor, and then fled. S/he is outraged by this disrespectful behavior and is distraught that s/he can’t identify the perpetrators or say where they came from or went. You, on the other hand, argue that Erin took advantage of your absence to hold a non-stop bacchanal which just ended before your arrival. Both explanations account for the observed pattern of detritus but yours has the advantage of:

• Simplicity (it is far easier to assume that this is your roommate’s doing than the actions of some band of trash-laden peripatetic strangers);
• Refutability (it’s a relatively easy matter to check with your hall-mates to see if there had been a party in your room whereas your roomie’s argument cannot easily be disproven);
• Generality (if Erin has a history of weekend partying then your explanation is strengthened by accounting for yet another piece of evidence that the alternative leaves out).

Note that while your explanation is the better of the two on offer it has not been definitively established as true. It does not take long to come up with other explanations that could account for the pattern of debris that you observe. Nonetheless, there is no doubt that your inference is the most plausible of the set of possibilities and you have solid grounds for proceeding as though your explanation is true.

There are other features of this form of explanation to bear in mind. First, it is ampliative. That is to say that the conclusions contain more information than their premises. You amplified your original observations to make a statement about Erin’s unfortunate weakness for partying. Strictly speaking, the mess you found did not logically require that your roommate was the culprit. Your interpretation was plausible, almost certainly correct, but went beyond the debris you found to infer the behaviors that caused that mess. Thus, your inference to the best explanation was ampliative in that it added information that made sense of, and went beyond, your original observations.

Second, inferences to the best explanation are open-ended. That is, they can be refuted by the recovery of more information. You may, in a week or so, open the door to find, standing outside your room, a gaggle of trash-bearing miscreants preparing to dump their load of pizza and beer detritus all over your living quarters. At that point you will realize that Erin’s explanation, though not as simple or easily refutable as yours, actually accounts for this new piece of information better than your original inference. In other words, every inference to the best explanation, no matter how reasonable and certain it may seem at the moment, is always susceptible to being overturned as the result of acquiring new evidence.

Common Sense and Worldviews

As widespread as reasoning by inference to the best explanation may be, there are significant differences in how this process of explaining observations is pursued in and outside systematic investigations of human behavior. This distinction relates to the difference between good and common sense. Antonio Gramsci (see Box 1.1) originally made this distinction as part of his effort to reformulate certain aspects of Marxist theory. As you can see in Box 1.1, we have repurposed his terms to our own ends.

BOX 1.1 Antonio Gramsci

Antonio Gramsci was an Italian Marxist who was born in 1891. He was imprisoned by Benito Mussolini’s Fascist government from 1929–1935, dying two years after his release. He is one of the most influential thinkers within the broad Marxist tradition though he published relatively little during his short life. Most of his insights appeared posthumously when his Prison Notebooks, 3,000 or so pages that he wrote while he was incarcerated, were eventually published. One of Gramsci’s most significant contributions to Marxist thought was his notion that members of the dominant class in capitalist societies maintained power not through force alone. Rather, their preeminence depended in large part on their ability to impose their vision of the world and their elevated place in it through institutions they controlled. This elite hegemony inculcated in the majority principles of common sense by which they lived their lives. Common sense is a mode of reasoning that accepts as given and unquestionable the guiding premises of the dominant worldview. Gramsci contrasted common sense with good sense, a clear-eyed vision of the world that sees through the obfuscations of elite hegemonies to the relations of exploitation that consistently disempower and grind down the working classes. Gramsci thus envisioned power as arising as much from the control of ideas as from the exercise of military or economic coercion. We have re-purposed Gramsci’s concepts to achieve other ends in this chapter. His ideas concerning ideology’s relation to the mode of production are however further developed in Chapters 5 and 6

Common sense refers to practical reasoning based on concepts and premises that are widely shared among members of a society. These foundational notions comprise a worldview that specifies the basic units of which reality is composed and the processes of cause and effect that animate relations among these entities, producing reality as we know it. In decoding the shambles that was your room, for example, you had no trouble attributing significance to the various bits of debris you found there. You knew immediately what a pizza was, what its crust looks like, the kind of cardboard conveyance pizza commonly comes in, just as you knew what beer cans signify and how people interact with both in meaningful, if messy, ways. At the same time you could, without much reflection, draw cause-and-effect connections between a party and its unfortunate consequences for your décor. Your inference to the best explanation that Erin was responsible for your quarters being in such disarray was, therefore, based on well-understood categories of things and their relations with people that all who share your worldview would easily understand.

Common sense and the worldviews on which they are based are essential to understanding reality and acting effectively within it. They serve as filters that allow us to interpret the complex sense impressions with which we are bombarded throughout our days. As such, worldviews help us to turn that confusing flux of stimuli into coherently structured information on the bases of which we can understand reality, our place in it, and take action. These filters are composed of ready-made categories in terms of which we can organize sense impressions and the established premises by which we can explain that organization. The resulting blueprints work to the extent that they simplify reality while still capturing enough of its salient features to serve as adequate guides for dealing successfully with that complexity. Worldviews are, therefore, models of reality that streamline its components and their relations into an intelligible form. Without them we would be paralyzed by trying to attend simultaneously to all the things we could perceive.

These indispensable guides to thought and action are characterized by certain features that make them questionable means to acquiring verifiable knowledge. First, if anthropology has taught us one thing it is that other people living in other places and at other times understand the world in terms of very different categories and causal relations. There are many ways of describing the world and explaining what occurs within it and none has a monopoly on accuracy. Second, as worldviews are learned early in life, they tend to guide our perceptions and actions unconsciously. Third, these understandings often carry emotional weight as they are deeply associated with the intimate experiences among kith and kin in which that initial learning takes place. We are loathe, therefore, to challenge our deeply implicit worldviews or have them questioned by others. To accept that these models of reality are lacking in some way is to admit that the premises on which we base our lives are flawed. To the extent that these fundamental assumptions define who we are in relation to the world, such questioning poses profound existential dilemmas. We don’t know who we are. As such, worldviews are not just models of, but also models for, reality. They specify how the world should be, not just how it is, structured.

This is a weak position from which to pursue new knowledge as these emotionally rich, unconsciously held conceptual models are resistant to being proved wrong. Their categories and assumptions define the basic parameters of our existence and so are not generally open to question. The only times these foundational premises are visible to us is during crises when it becomes increasingly obvious that their descriptions and expectations no longer match what is happening around us. For example, the arrival of European explorers during the fifteenth century in the Americas posed significant challenges to the well-established worldviews of both the interlopers and indigenous populations. Pre-existing categories of people, plants, and animals were reformulated as were established notions of the historical relations among them.

Common sense interpretations of the behaviors of people who live according to different worldviews are, therefore, prone to all sorts of error. This is because when we use the concepts and processes that make sense in our models of and for reality to understand others’ actions we generally end up projecting our understandings of the world onto them. For example, until recently our worldview in the United States held that there were only two human genders and that they were biologically suited to different tasks. Women took care of raising children and pursuing domestic chores at home. Men were outward oriented, engaging in political and economic activities, such as cultivating distant fields and trading, that took them far from their domiciles. If we mistake this cultural construction of gender with human nature then we are prone to imposing our common sense understanding of gender on all past peoples.

There is a lot wrong with such an approach. First, inferences to the best explanation based on common sense premises will be ampliative in misleading ways as the assumptions on which they are based have no firm rooting in reality. We will be prone to drawing incorrect inferences about female associations with cooking hearths and male links with hunting tools. These associations might make sense in our worldview but may well be completely out of place in the cultures in which the people we studied lived. Second, by imposing our understanding of the world on the past we deny archaeological data the capacity to surprise us. What we find cannot challenge our deep-seated assumptions about what’s natural if the evidence we collect conforms narrowly to our preconceived notions. Using common sense, we may still be able to choose the best explanation of an event from a group of interpretations using the criteria listed earlier. But all of those inferences will be deeply flawed by the unwarranted assumptions which provide the link between observations and interpretation.

If we want to understand past cultures in their own terms, and to explain the actions of their members in ways that approximate the richness of their lived experiences, then we cannot simply use the precepts of our worldviews to understand their realities. To strip away these blinkers we need other ways of knowing. This is what archaeologists are trying to achieve through the use of theory.

Good Sense and Theories

Seeing past our preconceptions involves a conscious effort to employ good, not common, sense. By good sense we mean that we must try to reason in ways that lead us to see the world as it really is and not how we think it should be. In the process, we replace worldviews with theories.

Before proceeding further, it may be helpful to distinguish different levels of theory (Table 1.1). Low-level theory refers to regularities based on direct observations (e.g., all kiwi birds are flightless). These are the patterns that you are trying to explain. High-level theory consists of precepts that explain a wide range of phenomena, including those patterns identified in low level theories (e.g., the synthetic theory of biological evolution can be used to account for the earthbound nature of kiwis). Middle-level theories explain relations among observed phenomena (low-level theories) using principles drawn from high-level theories. For example, the kiwis’ inability to get airborne might be accounted for by demonstrating how their flightlessness is an outcome of processes of adaptation by natural selection within the specific environmental conditions of New Zealand prior to the arrival of the ground-dwelling carnivores that people brought to the island. It is within the realm of middle-level theory that inferences to the best explanation are phrased, drawing on principles from high-level theories, and evaluated using the criteria cited earlier. Table 1.1 briefly summarizes the relations among the different levels of theory discussed in the text.

Escaping the limits of worldviews and common sense requires self-consciously fashioning high-level theories that, like worldviews, help us to focus on some aspects of reality while winnowing out other possible observations. Like worldviews, high-level theories identify concepts and relations that allow us to describe events and specify why they occurred. Those explanatory mechanisms involve identifying relations of causation and dependence among variables that the theory singles out for particular attention. Unlike worldviews, theories require an explicit statement of variables and their relations along with repeated testing of inferences to the best explanation.

Defining Variables, Testing Interpretations

Table 1.1 Different levels of theory

High-Level Theories	Middle-Level Theories	Low-Level Theories
Explanations of human behavior based on principles of broad application. Examples of high-level theories discussed in the book are culture history, processualism, and Marxian approaches.	Explanations of recurring patterns noted in archaeological remains by reference to principles of human behavior derived from high-level theories. It is through middle-level theories that high-level theories are evaluated a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Explanation, Theory, and the Social Sciences
• 2 The Naco Valley and Us
• 3 Culture History
• 4 Processualism
• 5 Marxism I: Trade and Power
• 6 Marxism II: Prestige Goods Theory
• 7 Practicing Power Over Time
• 8 Identity
• 9 Looking at Meaning: Semiotics
• 10 Phenomenology and Experience
• 11 New Materiality
• 12 Taking on the State in Southern Mesopotamia
• 13 Multiple Views of Stonehenge
• 14 Conclusions
• Suggested Readings
• Glossary
• Index