Archaeology and its Discontents

Why Archaeology Matters

John C. Barrett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000347579
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Archaeology and its Discontents examines the state of archaeology today and its development throughout the twentieth century, making a powerful case for new approaches.

Surveying the themes of twentieth-century archaeological theory, Barrett looks at their successes, limitations, and failures. Seeing more failures and limitations than successes, he argues that archaeology has over-focused on explaining the human construction of material variability and should instead be more concerned with understanding how human diversity has been constructed. Archaeology matters, he argues, precisely because of the insights it can offer into the development of human diversity. The analysis and argument are illustrated throughout by reference to the development of the European Neolithic.

Arguing both for new approaches and for the importance of archaeology as a discipline, Archaeology and its Discontents is for archaeologists at all levels, from student to professor and trainee to experienced practitioner.

1
EXPLANATION AND UNDERSTANDING

What might an archaeologist expect to know and how might they expect to know it?

In 2014 a group of fifteen academics, all but one of whom were resident in north America, identified what they claimed to be the most important scientific challenges that archaeology might be expected to address in a subsequent twenty-five-year period (Kintigh et al. 2014). The exercise was certainly optimistic. It assumed that researchers should be able to synthesise the very large data sets that archaeology had collected (Kintigh 2006), and that these data sets would provide ‘knowledge of the long-term trajectories of past societies’ (Kintigh et al. 2014, 6). It is with this knowledge that archaeology could, or so it was claimed, address current problems of a global and a contemporary significance. This claim was supported by the assertion that archaeological interpretations had already contributed to debates about ‘human responses to climate change, the eradication of poverty and the effects of urbanism and globalization on humanity’ (Kintigh et al. 2014, 6). The proposal outlined by Kintigh and his colleagues resulted in the 2018 founding of a Coalition for Archaeological Synthesis (archsynth.org).

The search for the various ‘archaeological challenges’ had originally involved enquiries directed to the major ‘North American and European professional (archaeological) organisations’ and a work-shop that was run for key participants, all of which resulted in twenty-five ‘grand challenges’ being identified. Instead of focusing upon individual historical events, these challenges focused upon analysing the general ways that human and cultural systems were organised and coupled together with their environments. The entire programme seems to echo an earlier observation that ‘the conviction is widely held that the discovery of cultural laws is an ultimate goal of anthropology, to be attained when fact-collecting and detailed analyses of particular cultures and sequences are sufficiently advanced’ (Steward 1949, 2).

The challenges that were identified by Kintigh and others can be grouped under five broad themes. These describe particular kinds of human historical trajectories that might be characterised as: (1) emergence, communities, and complexity; (2) resilience, persistence, transformation, and collapse; (3) movement, mobility, and migration; (4) cognition, behaviour, and identity; (5) human-environment interactions. All these challenges express the belief that archaeologists can, and should, co-operate to investigate the regularities that can be identified as operating through, and might thus explain, the various historical trajectories of humanity.

The Kintigh proposal maintains the belief that a clear distinction exists between archaeological data that are given and might describe something of what happened in the past, and their interpretation, for which we are responsible and which might seek to explain why those things happened. This reflects the current working practice in which the methodologies of fieldwork and analysis appear to be untroubled by changes that occur in theories that might impact upon historical interpretation (cf. Lucas 2012). Data are thus the archived results of excavation, survey, and collecting, where the archive contains the descriptions and samples of material residues that relate to the human past. Interpretation, on the other hand, establishes the significance of these data for our understanding of the past. The relationship between data and interpretation, between observation and understanding, is perhaps more complex than has sometimes been allowed, given that the data are collected, described, and catalogued with the expressed purpose that those data will then submit to interpretation. It would seem likely, therefore, that the means by which the data are to be interpreted must reflect something of the ways in which they have been collected and catalogued.

Archaeology has been defined as the discipline that enables us to examine the past by means of its surviving residues (cf. Chapman & Wylie 2016). We will review the kinds of historical knowledge that archaeologists have sought to establish, and how they have gone about establishing it, before considering the basis for an archaeological alternative. It was by assuming that they knew how the analysis of archaeological data should be undertaken that Kintigh and his colleagues established the priorities that, in their view, justified a financial investment by the National Science Foundation of the United States of America in the archaeologically directed development of information technologies. Whilst these technologies are intended to synthesise archaeological data and thus produce a form of historical knowledge, the entire process is obviously grounded upon knowing the kind of ‘historical knowledge’ that we want, and how the kinds of data that have been collected can furnish us with that knowledge.

The archaeological convention is that the surviving residues provide us with a material record of human history (Lucas 2012), and how they do this is one thing that this book is designed to investigate. Indeed, the ways in which archaeologically recovered residues might be interpreted have recently become matters of contention (cf. Moro Abadía 2017), and the processes of interpretation have often been expressed in terms that are both theoretical and abstract (Johnson 2010). One obvious point that must be emphasised is that these are our interpretations of a past that we do not inhabit. We might be tempted to treat such pasts as if they had once existed ‘apart from the present’ (Olsen et al. 2012, 6), and of course the lives that interest us were once lived in worlds that existed before our time, but the historical accounts of those other lives remain our accounts, we do not discover the past. This bequeaths to us a considerable responsibility, for the assumptions that we are prepared to make about those other lives will inform the assumptions that we will also be prepared to employ in our attempts to understand all other people, including our contemporaries.

By treating the material as if, in its degraded form, it represented or was in some way derived from human activity, it has seemed reasonable to distinguish between the ways that people once chose to do things, and the functions that their activities fulfilled. Thus, whilst all people need to eat, for example (providing food with its function), what they have chosen to eat and how they have chosen to eat it are matters of cultural convention and material availability. This distinction has proven to be remarkably important in the history of archaeological thinking because it has facilitated a distinction between the stylistic (cultural) traditions that were specific to particular historical and geographical contexts, and the more general themes of function and organisation that appear to have been shared across different cultures (Dunnell 1978).

The revitalisation of archaeological practices that occurred in the latter half of the twentieth century employed this distinction between the cultural style of an activity and the kind of function that activity had fulfilled. This revitalisation is often taken to have originated with the publication of Binford’s 1962 ‘Archaeology as Anthropology’, with its reference to the earlier assertion by Willey and Phillips that ‘American archaeology is anthropology or it is nothing’ (1958, 2). In his paper, Binford argued that archaeological data ‘represent the structure of the total cultural system’ and that ‘change in the total cultural system must be viewed in an adaptive context both social and environmental’ (Binford 1962, 217). The emphasis upon the context of a cultural system’s adaptation underscored the need to establish how human activity had functioned, rather than a concern with the stylistic ways in which those activities had been executed. Previously, archaeology’s emphasis had been upon tracing the history and the geographical distribution of different patterns of cultural styles, and this had meant, according to Binford, that whilst archaeology had made a major contribution in elucidating ‘the total range of physical and cultural similarities and differences characteristic of the entire spatial-temporal range of man’s [sic] existence’, it had nonetheless ‘made essentially no contribution in the realm of explanation’ (Binford 1962, 217). It was in the realm of explaining material-cultural change, expressed in terms other than the supposed spread of cultural influences, that Binford and others came to believe the particular contribution of archaeology lay. Twenty years after Binford’s paper was published Colin Renfrew commented that:

[a] recurring theme in the thinking and writing of most contemporary archaeologists – indeed perhaps the single dominant theme – is the need for archaeology to go beyond the mere reconstruction and description of the past and to seek insight enabling us to explain how that past came about. An essential characteristic of what is today called ‘processual archaeology’ is the intention to seek explanations for the archaeological record of the past in terms of valid general statements . . . . (Renfrew 1982, 5 emphasis original)

Kintigh and his colleagues have now repeated the demand that archaeology should be able to explain why the human past, as represented by archaeological materials, followed the direction that it did. Given that it has been more than fifty years since the first of these calls for a New Archaeology were made, we might begin to wonder why so little appears to have been achieved.

The impact upon the ways different observational data are prioritised as a result of the shift from reading the material record as the product of a variety of cultural influences, individual motivations, and past conventions of how to make and how to do things, to treating that record instead as if it attested to the economic and social functions which various activities had arisen to satisfy, can be illustrated by the way that Colin Renfrew re-orientated the study of the stone-built monuments that had been erected by the first agricultural communities of western Europe (Renfrew 1976).

The megaliths of western Europe

The earliest surviving stone-built (megalithic) monuments of Europe, the so-called chambered tombs of the Neolithic, are distributed along the Atlantic seaboard of Europe, from southern Sweden to Iberia, and were erected by some of the first European agriculturalists. Regarded as the representations of a single phenomenon of tomb building (Laporte & Scarre 2016), no independent radiocarbon chronology for these structures was established until the early 1960s. With that chronology now in place we know that the earlier estimated dating of this building tradition was both too short in its duration, and too recent in its origin (Daniel 1963 [1962], 143–146). Until the 1960s, these monuments of the Neolithic agriculturalists of western Europe were treated culturally, as representing the regional developments of a building tradition that expressed people’s ideas as to how their dead should be treated. These ideas were assumed to have been influenced both by the common origin of a single category of monument, and by the regionally developing techniques of tomb construction (Daniel 1963). The tradition of tomb building was therefore believed to represent the spread of a cult of communal burial, the origins of which were assumed to have lain in the eastern Mediterranean (Childe 1940, 46–80; Childe 1958, 124–134). Consequently, archaeological analysis was directed towards establishing the history, and the spread, of the megalithic cultural tradition by focusing upon the details of what were believed to have been sequences of regional architectural developments (cf. Daniel 1950b & 1960; Powell et al. 1969). This was the approach that Colin Renfrew sought to overturn by establishing a more generally adaptive and functional reason for why early European agriculturalists might have built these tombs in this part of Europe. While these monuments were still accepted to be the tombs that represented a cultural tradition concerning the ways that the dead should be buried, the dominant question that Renfrew posed was: what additional adaptive requirement might these monuments have satisfied?

Renfrew’s interpretation of the data exploited the implications derived from the first radiocarbon dates. These indicated that the tombs predated, by a considerable margin, their previously claimed Mediterranean precursors, and the new chronology implied that some of the earliest of these monuments were found in western France (Renfrew 1976 & 1973b, 120–146; cf. Schulz Paulsson 2019). By providing the grounds for rejecting accounts of cultural diffusion, whilst also hoping to explain the emergence of megalithic tombs as a class of monuments, a category that Renfrew accepted was the product of ‘a taxonomic decision of our own’, he maintained that the tombs arose as the manifestation of:

a particular set of conditions [that] existed in the Atlantic region at this time, conditions that were not seen elsewhere in Europe, and that these favoured the construction of stone monuments by the small-scale societies of the time. Such a general formulation . . . would explain for us the essentially independent genesis of stone monuments, no doubt of widely different forms in several areas. (Renfrew 1976, 199)

Renfrew argued that the category of ‘megalithic tomb’ was unified not by its derivation from a common origin and the subsequent diffusion of an evolving cultural idea, but rather by the functional role of tomb building in securing the ongoing claims of segmentary units of agriculturalists to territories of land (Figures 1.1 & 1.2). It was this role that had resulted from the conditions that pertained in several different regions along the Atlantic facade of Europe during the early Neolithic, and it was these conditions that therefore determined the ways that people had behaved. Renfrew’s argument was:

to see in these monuments an expression of territorial behaviour in small-scale segmentary societies . . . [and] to suggest that such forms of territorial behaviour may be particularly frequent in small-scale segmentary societies of this kind in circumstances of population stress. (Renfrew 1976, 200)

The existence of ‘population stress’ was an entirely hypothetical explanation, given that no empirical data was offered to support its existence. Instead Renfrew argued that this ‘stress’ had arisen as the result of an advancing wave of colonising agriculturalists, arriving from central Europe, who were forced to adapt to the absence of any further opportunities for westward dispersal by the existence of the Atlantic seaboard (cf. Giot 1963, 3). The resulting population pressure was assumed to have been exacerbated because these migrants had arrived in coastal and riverine environments that might still have been heavily settled by hunter-gatherers (Renfrew 1976, 213). Thus, whilst cultural archaeology had treated the detailed architectural comparisons of individual monuments as signifying the execution of certain cultural ideas that had been transmitted from one place to another, Renfrew’s interpretation abandoned the treatment of architectural form as expressing cultural influences and turned instead to treat the pattern of tomb distributions as signifying the emergence of a form of territorial land-holding.

FIGURE 1.1 Renfrew’s map indicating the proposed regions for the independent development of chambered tombs (Renfrew 1973c, Fig. 25).

Both the earlier cultural analysis, and the alternative offered by Renfrew, employ general assumptions, in the first case about people’s own deployment of cultural rules, and in the second about the possible development of small-scale segmentary societies responding to the presumed pressures of population growth. Both kinds of analysis therefore accepted that the material residues, classified archaeologically, signified the kinds of process that had resulted in the formation of those residues, and each also employed those aspects of the data (tomb form versus locational analysis) that best fitted with the explanation they sought to construct. In this way the earlier studies, which claimed to trace cultural histories, referenced the

FIGURE 1.2 Renfrew’s map of tomb locations on the Isle of Arran, Argyll, with hypothetical territories outlined, and with modern arable land indicated by stippling (Renfrew 1976, Fig. 6).

architectural detail of particular monuments arising from what were claimed to have been culturally transmitted and locally executed rules of behaviour. The form of the monuments was not the kind of data that was addressed by Renfrew whose concern lay instead with the geographical distribution of the monuments as indicative of the early agricultural adaptation to the landscape by means of territorially based activities (Figure 1.2).

From explanation to understanding

In 1942 Carl Hempel published what was to become a widely referenced paper on the function of general laws in historical analyses (Hempel 1942). Hempel’s argument here and in its later development (cf. Hempel & Oppenheim 1948), was that the occurrence of an event that required to be explained (the explanandum) could be explained by an explanans, which expressed a combination of the initial and the boundary conditions that had operated within the context of one or more general laws. A historical event, according to the Hempel model, is therefore explained when the antecedent conditions are subsumed within what William Dray characterised as a ‘covering law’ (Dray 1957). From this perspective, historical generalities were not to be described simply as organised assemblages of activities and material conditions. Instead the historical conditions that had generated the assemblages of residue had been governed by the laws of historical process which resulted in predictable, or at least statistically probable, outcomes (Salmon 1993).

The Hempel model found enthusiastic support among many archaeologists in the 1970s who saw it as providing a basis for the scientific analysis of the historical conditions to which they were able to attest archaeologically. These archaeologists regarded the ultimate aim of archaeology as establishing the covering laws that had governed the historical processes, to which archaeological residues attested, and within which human activities had once operated (Fritz & Plog 1970; Watson et al. 1971). This enthusiasm was not shared by al...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Explanation and understanding
• 2 The archaeological record
• 3 Systems and the dynamics of historical change: The New Archaeology
• 4 A Social Archaeology
• 5 From functionalism to a symbolic and structural archaeology
• 6 The evolution of ecosystems
• 7 The making of populations
• 8 The cultures of life
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index