Course Content Summary

I want briefly to present some of the points and counterpoints that afflict archaeology today and which we whose origins and significance we will study in this course.

1. Today archaeology appears to many to be in crisis. After a period where the tenets of first culture history, then processual archaeology dominated the discipline, there is a growing proliferation of different approaches, many conflicting.

Includes on the one hand adherents of various current versions of empirical thought:

-Processualists (heirs of New Archaeological positivism of the 60s and 70s)

-strict non-positivist empirical and materialist schools - evolutionary Selectionists

- Marxists.

On the other hand we have the archaeologists who do not see archaeology as a science at all and derive their theoretical foundations from postmodernism and critical theory:

- variously called post-Structuralists

post-processualists

critical theorists,

Each of which category has its own range of belief, some of which view archaeology chiefly as a means to social critique and political polemic, others that use largely humanistic thought to address issues of the past.

2. In general, while there are scholars who seek to bridge the divide, the diversity in archaeology today is between two chief worldviews, each with its diverse range of specific approaches:

First, the tradition based in Positivist thought, a tradition that reached its modern expression in the Enlightenment of the late 17th-18th centuries and its current approaches in the dominant intellectual school of Positivism.

Positivism is the optimistic movement which believes in the ability of researchers to explain the human and natural universe and identify the universal forces that order them. It permeated all natural and social sciences through the 1970's and remains one of the most influential components of Western thought today.

A i: Archaeology as Social Science

- sees archaeology as a generally scientific discipline, - shares the goals and methods of the natural sciences with which it is inextricably linked as science.

- benefits with the rest of science from the consistent and unilinear accumulation of knowledge that started with the Greeks and continues to this day.

A ii: The subject matter of this approach is human SOCIETY, the structure within which human groups conduct their lives.

- subsumes the individual within a set of mutually dependent social systems (economic, technological, political etc). - systems obey universal and identifiable laws, like the data of natural scientific enquiry.

- systems are real entities that leave the material record as an accurate reflection of activities and behaviors. - these records can be examined by archaeologists and their meaning known through the application of systematic methodology and the interplay of scientific theorizing and empirical observation.

B i: The other worldview is anti-positivist and sees the subject matter of archaeology as HUMAN CULTURE and connects archaeology with history as a humanistic field of enquiry. .

- human beings and their CULTURES replace generalized and depersonalized SOCIAL SYSTEMS as agents of social change.

- Cultures are the values and rules & the behaviors that these determine.

- the product of the specific experiences of specific groups, thus not universal as in social systems of positivist thought.

- unavoidably accepts the distinctive nature of each human culture and emphasizes variation and difference rather than similarity & generalization.

- just as unavoidably rejects the operation of universal laws within which specific cultures and their human creators become insignificant products of universal social forces.

- thus recognizes the human individual as a social actor.

B ii There are other profound implications of an intellectual of a viewpoint that rejects the existence of unifying laws and processes and elevates the distinctive over the general - these lie at the center of debate in archaeology today.

- First, on the operational level, by rejecting the efficacy of general scientific theory, the antipositivist espouses a narrative historic view of events rather than scientific explanations. This affects methodology, goals and the methods of disseminating results.

B iii. However, there are even more fundamental implications that involve how knowledge itself is constituted. Clearly one cannot reject the usefulness of scientific applications without questioning the philosophical tenets they are meant to further.

- Thus archaeological anti-positivists (post-processualists, critical theorists, post-structuralists) embrace post- modern pessimism as to the possibility of acquiring objective meaning from material remains and the past social systems of which they were part.

- While not necessarily rejecting our ability to identify an artifact, they reject our ability to every identify a precise original social meaning.

There are two reasons for this:

1 - Any object has significance in more than one social arena. Thus our interpretation is only one of many equally valid to the people who made and used it

2 - Our interpretation is skewed by our own experience as Western scholars in 1996. We are products of our culture, society and discipline and we are unconsciously trained to uphold the existing order within which we live and have been educated. This will determine how we view the world, the questions we ask and the meanings we assert.

Thus by rejecting archaeology as a science we reject the reality of scientifically objective scholarship, the existence of absolute knowledge, the possibility for scientific explanation, and must rest on interpretation based on various forms of historical or hermeneutic approaches.

The challenge then becomes to establish a new theoretic basis within which it is possible to gain some plausible insight into the past. Or, indeed if such objective facts do not exist a whether it is even useful to try.

3. While the most basic debate in archaeology today is between outgrowths of positivism on one side and post-modernism on the other within this division are other more debates that may be more restricted in the scope but because of this are often more directed and productive:

A - A major debate between positivists and others concerns the nature of present day knowledge (epistemology), a theme that is relevant for understanding the present foundations, thus validity, of archaeological theory AND our understanding of the evolution of social construction in past societies.

- On one hand we have scholars who believe that scientific disciplines have evolved through a linear, progressive course, that thus we now control the accumulated knowledge of all our predecessors. Knowledge builds on the past in a basically progressive evolutionary viewpoint.

- On the other hand are scholars who feel that the way in which we study and understand our physical and metaphysical experience passes through periodic transformations or paridigmatic revolutions in which existing systems of knowledge have been replaced by others. Their component discoveries are re-integrated into entirely new structures. In the sciences this means that entire theoretical approaches are proved unsound and rejected.

- These conflicting ideas clearly have relevance to how we view and use the tenets of opposing theoretical schools, of which there have been several in then history of archaeology and our approach to studying the past.

B. - A final related, debate concerns the political role of academia and is ideological in nature.

- Stems from the postmodernist belief that knowledge is contextually/historically constructed.

- Knowledge of the past is the product of our cultural, economic, social, and political experience.

- without knowing it we reiterate the generally accepted tenets of our society and class and reinforce the strength - of the capitalist way of life with its inherent inequalities of class, gender and economic controls.

- Many post-processual archaeologists and critical theorists feel that archaeologists must bring this contextual awareness to play both in its wider disciplinary development and in the goals of their research, thus using archaeology for an essentially political purpose to revise ideas of the past and change the present.

- Positivists of course totally reject this in their belief that they can carry out neutral, objective science that is unaffected by political/ cultural beliefs.

4. There are other such conflicts that will emerge.

6. Thus archaeology is either in hopelessly fragmented crisis or is excitingly open to a variety of intellectual assessment and enquiry, depending on your point of view. In either case at this juncture at least, and by contrast with various times in the past, there are no universally held dogmas or guidelines to dictate our future as archaeologists and no single textbook that will teach you A theory and practice of Archaeology.

6. Given this diversity in the discipline this certainly makes for some very interesting comparative studies and stimulating challenges as we search for our directions. It also makes teaching a course like this rather more difficult than it did 10 or 20 years ago when we thought we had a single major viewpoint.

7. Confronting these issues in their full historic and intellectual contexts can and must help us to chose our own path to the study of past peoples.

- it allows us to see how once-accepted views about the past have changed with changing social and intellectual settings, and how different approaches have arisen.

- This will help us as unique individuals to clarify for ourselves what we can learn about past people by addressing these vital philosophical questions that are central to current archaeology.

- In turn we become more self-consciously aware scholars, more able to generate ideas and bring personal involvement to their exploration. No longer can archaeology be a passively learnt technology that can be passively applied.

5. You may gather from this that while I do have a personal approach to studies of past peoples, I shall not attempt to impose this on you. That's not what this class is about. Rather I intend to introduce you to the various ways in which scholars have attempted to answer questions regarding explanation of the past in the present for themselves, thus allowing us better to develop our own ideas and convictions of the values and potentials of archaeology.