Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Brendon Wilkins. Paper presented to WAC 06, Dublin, 2008.
Abstract
Recent decades have seen a proliferation of new scientific approaches to
archaeological material. These studies have added impetus to longstanding
archaeological debates, but they have also resulted in a disciplinary divergence of
archaeological science from humanitiesbased interpretive archaeology. This paper
explores how these issues connect with a site excavated on the N6 Galway to
Ballinasloe road scheme in Ireland. The site posed significant interpretive problems to
excavators, with some features (such as a Bronze Age pyre) that were very clearly
defined but had few recorded parallels, and other more enigmatic features that may or
may not have been token cremation burials, but were undetermined by the evidence.
Interpretation at the ‘trowels edge’ is taken to refer to the greater involvement of
specialists at excavation stage, enabling the record to be interrogated for more
archaeologically relevant answers. This paper is about what happened when we put
that theory into practice.
Introduction
Why does a dog wag its tail? In the film ‘Wag the Dog,’ a Washington spin‐doctor
distracts the electorate from a U.S. presidential sex scandal by hiring a Hollywood
producer to construct a fake war with Albania. The thinly disguised plot satirised
the Clinton sex scandal, with reference to the Gulf War as an electoral tactic, and its
based on the classic Christmas cracker, “Why does a dog wag its tail? Because a dog
is smarter than its tail (if the tail was smarter than the dog then the tail would wag
the dog!)”. Although we have a dog at my mums that remains the exception to the
rule.
The moral of the tale is the absurdity of something of greater significance – the
electorate (or the dog) – being driven by something of lesser significance – the
media and government (or in this case the tail). The film also drew on serious
themes, as outlined in the book “The Gulf War Did Not Take Place” by Jean
Baudrillard. The point he makes is that despite massive bloodshed, the first Gulf war
was relayed to us as a masquerade of edited images and information that bore little
relation to the reality of war. Governments made decisions and consensus was
reached with the electorate, several steps away from what might be called by this
sessions abstract, the Heart of Matters.
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The problem
It’s this theme I want to pursue in this very short contribution, drawing out some of
the interpretive problems we had interpreting a commercially excavated Bronze age
pyre. In many respects the theory/practice divide in archaeology is a wag the dog
situation. As a commercially employed field archaeologist, I enter the field with a
legally binding method statement (in Ireland) or written scheme of investigation (in
the UK). Once the topsoil has been stripped by machine to the level of the natural
subsoil, I’m confronted by a cacophony of chaos. To the untrained eye these are
nothing more than dark splodges and amorphous blobs, but I can see at least 70
archaeological features, and put a costed time prediction on how long the site will
take to excavate.
Herein lies the nub of the interpretive dilemma. How we excavate a feature,
especially in the commercial sector, will be determined to some extent by a prior
decision that the feature is worth investigating, and inevitably an idea will form of
what that feature is. Our methodologies box, bag, label and record finds and samples
from these features. These are then dispersed to a range of absentee specialists who
then report back their results for inclusion in a final integrated report. But in many
respects this magnifies the interpretive dilemma to a new order of magnitude.
In relation to this session’s theme – the archaeologies of humanity – specialists may
be called upon to investigate the meaning of a particular burial or cremation,
analysing temporal and spatial distribution, sex, age or pathological conditions – but
these are modern analytical categories derived from medical science. In many
respects we have already decided the most important thing about it when we call it
a burial, and the possibility of understanding anything new and surprising is
dramatically lessened. This is of crucial importance, because we study the past not
to mirror ourselves, but to understand past societies in terms of their social contexts
and lived experiences. The first question a theoretically engaged field archaeology
must address is: how do we stop the tail wagging the dog?
The Site
The amorphous blobs I showed you earlier were excavated in the townland of
Newford, Co. Galway, approximately 1.5 km southwest of Athenry. The natural
subsoil was golden brown, texture like sand. We found a pyre associated with a
complex arrangement of structural post‐holes, some of which contained burnt bone
that may have been deliberately deposited as part of final burial rites.
Of the 73‐recorded features, there were 5 pits (four with burnt bone), 44 post‐
holes/stake holes (seven of which contained burnt bone), and 18 post‐holes/stake
holes with multiple fills (three of which contained burnt bone). The small quantity
of cremated bone recovered from 14 of these features amounted to just 3% of the
overall cremated bone recovered from the site. It occurred in such small quantities
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that we weren’t able to identify it as definitely human. But the deposit was definitely
placed into the primary fills, with a high composition of charcoal. If these were
token cremation burials, the quantity of burnt bone is much less than we might
expect, but this bone was unlikely to have been windblown secondary deposition,
because the date estimations place this phase at the beginning of the first
millennium BC, with the pyre coming at least 100 years later.
The field evidence for the pyre was unequivocal. It had slightly irregular vertical
sides and a flat but slightly irregular base sloping towards the south‐west. It was 2.6
m in length, 2 m in width and 0.75 m deep, and contained a number of separate
deposits, including a concentration of burnt human bone. An area of iron pan and
spilling of the fill was located to the west of the feature and incorporated throughout
the fills, and the pyre truncated a post‐hole that may have been part of the earlier
phase just outlined.
So how should we characterise this site? Was this a domestic site followed some
years later by a funerary site? The pits and post‐holes didn’t make any pattern that
could be readily interpreted as an upstanding building, and the lack of other
indicators for settlement debris argued against this being the site of a domestic
building. And what about the minute evidence for burnt bone? Was this a cremation
cemetery, the location for secondary funerary rites that was then used for primary
rites of a single individual?
Theory/practice divide
The site posed significant interpretive problems, with some features (such as a
Bronze Age pyre) that were very clearly defined but had few recorded parallels, and
other more enigmatic features that may or may not have been token cremation
burials, but were undetermined by the evidence.
At least part of the problem arises from how archaeologists and its multitude of
separate specialists, stand in relation to the material data. As well as archaeological
scientists, I would also include commercially employed field archaeologists in this as
a breed of specialist excavators. The disciplinary division between archaeological
science and interpretive archaeology is problematic, especially when attempting to
incorporate knowledge produced using a scientific methodology into an interpretive
synthesis. The problem remains one of retaining a rationalist core of knowledge
onto which culturally specific understandings can be mapped. As specialists, we are
concerned with such questions as how old is the sample or feature under
investigation, where did it come from, and how has it been modified through
taphonomic processes. These are questions arising from difficulties in interpreting
the data rather than an attempt to understanding how the implications of such
conclusions can be used for understanding human behaviour in the past.
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This may also be a result of how we conceive of the excavated data. Context has two
meanings; in the field, depositional context is used to refer to the single
stratigraphic unit, a methodological innovation of the last 20 years, marking the
advent of commercial archaeology and large‐scale rescue excavations. This is
accessed directly through the Harris matrix, and provides, firstly a cross‐referenced
site archive, and secondly, aims to separate objective from subjective information.
This systematic approach to recording has been almost universally adopted in
Britain by archaeologists of all persuasions.
The second meaning, of ‘interpretive context’ is associated with post‐processualist
theoretical approaches. This relates to Linda Patrik’s analysis of the two contrasting
models of ‘archaeological record’ ‐ the physical and the textual. The physical model
recognises the archaeological record as a direct record of physical objects and
processes. The features and the spatial order of the record is a result of causal
regularity and operate according to universalistic and probabilistic laws. The textual
model sees the record as composed of physical objects and features that are
material signs and symbols of past concepts. The record records human actions,
ideas and events of human importance. The structure of the record is composed of
rule‐guided behaviour expressed in culturally specific ways.
One method to bridge the gap between both ‘cultures’ is to develop an interpretive
strategy that ‘tacks’ back and forth between theory and data. Secure knowledge of
the past can be realised, developing inferential strength and independent strands of
evidential constraint. Aspects of archaeological science may themselves be
experimental, relying on why‐necessarily forms of deductive reasoning, but as a
historical science, secure statements in archaeology will be characterised by a how‐
possibly form of reasoning, drawing on both inductive and deductive forms of
reasoning.
Ian Hodders work at Catalhouyuk has tried to meet this problem head on, with
relexive approach used to engender multivocality. By involving a multi‐disciplinary
team of specialists at every stage of the project from data collection to final analysis,
productive tensions emerge forcing both specialists and excavators to reassess basic
assumptions. Rather than make statements about the past as a series of inferential
steps originating from either humanities or science based research agendas,
knowledge claims can be secured by exploiting as many conceptual and empirical
resources as possible.
Under a director lead system in Ireland, at its best this is how road scheme
archaeology is run in Ireland. The substantial resources available for infrastructural
projects and the potential for encountering the unexpected provide for fantastic
opportunities for archaeological research, as long as specialist staff and consultants
are involved in the primary data collection as well as the final analysis. But in
practice, the debate continues, and in the case of Newford, underdetermined by the
evidence. Perhaps we should accept, the science side of the discipline will always be
off pace when it comes to appreciating the finer nuances of archaeological
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reasoning, just as the humanities side may not be au fait with the latest advances in
experimento‐predictive sciences. We should look to occasions such as this week at
WAC, when dialogue between all sides of the discipline can flourish.