Archaeological theory covers the debates over the practice of archaeology and the interpretation of archaeological results. There is no single theory of archaeology, and even definitions are disputed. Until the mid-20th century and the introduction of technology, there was a general consensus that archaeology was closely related to both history and anthropology. Since then, elements of other disciplines such as geology, physics, chemistry, biology, metallurgy, engineering, medicine, etc, have found an overlap, resulting in a need to revisit the fundamental ideas behind archaeology.
Culture history
The first major phase in the history of archaeological theory is commonly referred to as
Cultural-history archaeology. The product of cultural history was to group sites 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 of
history. Cultural historians employed the
normative 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 excavated
sherd of 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 by
Diffusion (anthropology) whereby new ideas moved, through social and economic ties, from one culture to another.
The Australian archaeologist
Vere Gordon Childe was 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 that
revolutions had wrought major changes in past societies. He conjectured a
Neolithic 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 second
Urban Revolution that created the first
city. Such macro-scale thinking was in itself revolutionary and Childe's ideas are still widely admired and respected.
Processual archaeology (New Archaeology)
In the
1960s, a number of young, primarily American archaeologists, such as
Lewis 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 term
processual archaeology). Processualists borrowed from the
exact sciences the idea of
hypothesis testing and the
scientific 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 which
cultures had taken precedence over the people being studied themselves. It was becoming clear, largely through the evidence of anthropology, that
ethnic groups and their development were not always entirely congruent with the cultures in the
archaeological record.
Behavioral archaeology
An approach to the study of archaeological materials formulated by
Michael Brian Schiffer in the mid 1970’s that privileged the analysis of
human behaviour and individual actions, especially in terms of the making, using, and disposal of
material 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.
Post-processual archaeology
In the
1980s, a new movement arose led by the British archaeologists
Michael Shanks (archaeologist),
Christopher Tilley,
Daniel Miller (anthropologist) and
Ian Hodder. It questioned processualism's appeals to science and impartiality by claiming that every archaeologist is in fact biased by his or her 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 the
scientific method dictates. Exponents of this relativistic method, called
post-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 different
constructs of 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.
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-fileds 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
0 and this last approach is common in other countries where commercial
Cultural Resources Management is practised.
The impact of ideology
Much of the early history of professional archaeology was motivated by an attempt to distance itself from pseudo-archaeologists and dilettantes, and to establish itself as a science. While this battle has been won, 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.
Marxism or Marxist-influenced archaeologists in the
Soviet Union and the
United Kingdom (among others) often try to prove the truth of
dialectical materialism or 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. Some used the "Great Ages" theory implicit in the
three-age system to argue continuous upward progress by Western civilisation. Much contemporary archaeology is influenced by neo-Darwinian evolutionary thought,
phenomenology,
postmodernism,
Structure and agency,
Cognitive archaeology,
Functionalism (sociology),
Gender archaeology and
Feminist archaeology and
Systems theory in archaeology.
References
Trigger, B. G. 1989
A History of Archaeological Thought. ed. Cambridge University Press, Melbourne.
Hodder, Ian. 1991 Postprocessual Archaeology and the Current Debate. In
Processual 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.
Praetzellis, A. 2000
Death by Theory: A Tale of Mystery and Archaeological Theory. AltaMira Press.
1Category:Archaeological theoryCategory:Methods and principles in archaeologyel:Αρχαιολογική θεωρίαes:Historia y teoría de la Arqueologíano:Arkeologisk teoript:Teoria arqueológicasv:Arkeologisk teorihttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaeological theory
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