Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Julian Thomas
School of Arts, Histories and Cultures
University of Manchester
Yet it was undoubtedly the colonial enterprise that enabled exotic people in
distant places to be equated with Europeans in the distant past, conflating spatial
and temporal difference. This had the positive effect of reducing the dependence
on the accounts of barbarians that had been provided by classical authors, but it
also began to establish the identification of non-Europeans as primitives (Wylie
1985: 65). During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Native Americans were
commonly cast as the least cultivated form of humanity, so that John Locke was
able to claim that in the beginning all the world was America (1965: 343), while
John Aubrey argued that the Ancient British had been two or three degrees less
savage than the Americans (Daniel 1980: 29). Similarly, John Whites
illustrations of Britons and Algonquians are to some degree interchangeable, and
importantly Robert Plot used American evidence to suggest how prehistoric stone
tools might have been hafted (Piggott 1976: 7). This equation of the past with the
present took on a greater significance in the eighteenth century, when ideas of
social evolution that had been neglected since Greek and Roman times began to
resurface. The evolutionary schemes of the Enlightenment were at first
conjectural histories, composed of a succession of abstract social forms which
illustrated the way that humankind had progressively transformed their conditions
of existence through the application of reason (Cassirer 1951: 47; Horowitz 1987:
87). Montesquieu, in his Spirit of the Laws (1748) had sketched the idea that
different kinds of society were organised in quite different ways, but it was
Turgots planned universal history (eventually published 1844) that introduced a
scheme in which successive modes of subsistence (hunting, pastoralism,
agriculture) reflected humanitys gradual mastery of nature. In the manner of
Voltaire, these imagined histories posited a universal human spirit and a knowable
human nature, which are realised through the historical process.
Once social development was understood as a series of distinct stages, these could
be used as a basis for classification, and the past could be populated by analogies
drawn from the present. Thus conjectural prehistory came to be replaced by
ethnographic prehistory (Adams 1998: 34). An early example of the latter was
Adam Fergusons Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), which made use of
descriptions of Native Americans in order to distinguish between stages of
savagery and barbarism. It would be some time before archaeological evidence
was used in a similar way. A significant step was Christian Thomsens work at the
museum of the Danish Antiquities Commission at the start of the nineteenth
century, in which exhibits were organised according to a three-age scheme of
stone, bronze and iron (Klindt-Jensen 1975: 50). Having studied in Paris it is
probable that Thomsen was familiar with Mahudels abstract formulation of the
three-age system of 1734 (Trigger 1989: 60), but his innovation was to employ a
stadial scheme as a means for classifying artefacts. This kind of ordering itself
represented a significant break from the cabinets and collections of the early
modern period, which had been organised on the basis of perceived
correspondences and sympathies between objects (Hooper-Greenhill 1992: 124).
In this respect, Lubbocks arguments differ subtly from those of Lewis Henry
Morgan, which represent the culmination of the tradition of ethnographic
prehistories. While Morgan agreed that technological change was the motor that
drove social evolution, his sequence of stages elaborated on Robertsons
terminology of savagery, barbarism and civilization, and each stage was
characterised by a distinctive form of kin organisation (Morgan 1877: 12). Where
Lubbock uses archaeological evidence to document the process of evolution in
specific areas, Morgan draws on ethnography to establish generalised stages that
might be expected to apply more widely, if not universally. Yet while this suggests
a degree of divergence between nascent anthropological and archaeological
approaches, in the period following the publication of Darwins Origin of Species
(1859) there was some commonality of purpose amongst those attempting to apply
evolutionary insights to human society. For instance, Lubbock, Tylor, A.L.F. Pitt
Rivers (then known as Lane Fox), Thomas Huxley and John Evans were all close
associates in the Ethnological Society and the Anthropological Institute of Great
Britain during the 1860s and 1870s (Bowden 1991: 46). This was the milieu in
which General Pitt Rivers, the father of modern field archaeology, was able to
develop a set of ideas that compared the evolution of material culture to that of
biological organisms (Bowden 1991: 54). On the basis of his interest in weaponry,
Pitt Rivers asserted that types of spears and clubs that proved successful in warfare
would be retained, while those that failed would be abandoned. It followed that it
should be possible to create evolutionary typologies of artefacts, using the forms
of classification that were already in use in biology (Thompson 1977: 34). Pitt
Rivers early excavations were principally designed as a means of acquiring
stratified sequences of artefacts (and particularly weapons), and it was only later
that he developed the analytical approach to sites and landscapes for which he is
renowned. His existing interest in ethnography and the collection of artefacts
from around the world fuelled his belief that the study of non-western peoples
could inform the study of prehistoric Europe (Bradley 1983: 4). But it equally fed
a deeply conservative version of evolutionism, in which social as well and
biological change were perceived as progressing very slowly, and savages (as
well as the lower orders) were not to be advanced toward civilization by reform or
education.
Aschers call for archaeologists to undertake their own research amongst living
societies in order to investigate the relationship between social processes and
material conditions was increasingly responded to from the end of the 1960s
onwards. A new sub-discipline of ethnoarchaeology began to address such issues
as the location and process of waste disposal, the manufacture and variability of
artefacts, the spatial organisation of social life, and mobility patterns associated
with economic activities (Stiles 1977: 91). Some ethnoarchaeological research
attempted to concentrate on physical processes that were not dependent on human
intervention, such as the dilapidation and collapse of dwelling structures, the role
of scavenging animals in the formation of bone assemblages, or the dispersal of
artefact assemblages by wind and water action (Lane 2006: 406). However, in
practice these happenings do not take place in abstraction from any social context,
and ethnoarchaeological research has had to take this into account. Much of the
early work was concerned simply with demonstrating that intuitive interpretations
of artefacts and structures could be thoroughly misleading, as with Bonnichsens
(1973: 285) account of the explanation of structures and deposits at an abandoned
Native American camp in the Canadian Rockies provided by a former inhabitant.
In its mature phase, however, ethnoarchaeology was able to reveal something of
the intricacy of everyday material life, and the complex re-working and cycling of
objects and materials that contributes to what eventually becomes an
archaeological site. As such, it laid to rest forever the impression that sites could
be read as a map of a past society, stopped in its tracks (Lane 2006: 410). This
recognition was bought at the price of a loss of innocence, however. Some
practitioners have come to argue that studying living people in order to provide
insights about the past treats them in an unacceptably instrumentalist fashion, an
ethical situation quite distinct from other forms of ethnography (Fewster 2001).
The New Archaeology: archaeology as anthropology
The dissatisfaction amongst American archaeologists with a largely
descriptive culture-history resurfaced during the early 1960s. Revealingly, Lewis
Binfords (1962) polemic against the status quo was framed in terms of a need to
make archaeology more anthropological, and it is highly significant that there had
been a return to theories of social evolution within American anthropology by this
time, inspired by the very different approaches of Leslie White (1959) and Julian
Steward (1955). Although American archaeology was institutionally lodged
within anthropology, Binford argued that it had failed to contribute to the major
debates of the broader discipline, because it had not managed to relate its subject
matter to the study of human society. Archaeologists continued to follow Boas in
seeing material culture as a set of mutually equivalent traits, whose function was
barely considered. Binford advocated a systemic approach, in which artefacts
operated in a number of different ways in an adaptive process that linked culture,
population and environment (Binford 1962: 21). Material culture was not simply
technology, but was engaged in social, political and ideological relations. So
although there may be aspects of past societies that cannot be directly observed in
the material record, these would always have been linked systemically with
material culture, even if the latter is generally recovered in incomplete form
(Binford 1972: 91). Material culture was not only adaptive, but strategically
employed. Culture should be seen not as a set of cognitive norms, passed down
between generations or transmitted by diffusion, but as a range of behavioural
options, that are participated in differentially (Binford 1965: 125). Once it is
recognised that archaeology addresses societies as adaptive totalities, rather than
material fragments, the subject actually has an advantage over other aspects of
anthropology, since it has access to a broader range of societies and can study
these over appreciable depths of time.
The optimism of the early New Archaeology that grew out of Binfords arguments
was forcefully expressed in a series of studies of mortuary practice (Binford 1971;
Saxe 1971). While previous generations of archaeologists had considered funerary
activity to be part of the realm of ritual and religious belief, and thus beyond their
interpretive competence, Binford argued that death rites played an adaptive role.
On the basis of the comparison of a series of ethnographic cases, he suggested that
mortuary practice represented a signalling system, whereby the social persona and
status responsibilities of the deceased were conveyed to the surviving community,
enabling them to adjust to their loss (Binford 1971: 23). It followed from this that
societies with a more complex set of statuses and roles would have a more
elaborate and diverse set of funerary customs, and that more or less ranked
communities could be distinguished on the basis of the burial record that they left
behind. The belief that the structure of past societies was reflected in, or could be
correlated with the pattern of traces that they left behind was also seen in studies
of the spatial organisation of settlement patterns (Renfrew 1973: 15), and the use
of variations in pottery decoration to infer patterns of residence and descent (Deetz
1968: 41). The latter relied on the notion that micro-traditions of ceramic
manufacture might be discerned within groups of rooms at south-west United
States pueblos, such as the Carter Ranch Site, if potting were a female skill passed
down between mother and daughter, and if communities had been matrilocal and
matrilineal (Longacre 1964: 317; Hill 1970: 33). As we have seen already, it was
in part the development of ethnoarchaeology that demonstrated the complexity of
site formation processes and their articulation with social practices, revealing these
attempts to read off social relations from the archaeological record as somewhat
simplistic (Plog 1978: 148). At around this time, David Clarke argued that one of
the emerging aspects of contemporary archaeology was an anthropological
paradigm (Clarke 1972: 7). Yet it is clear from his description that what he was
referring to was not the application of anthropological insights to archaeological
evidence, but the attempt to extract social information from the material record. In
a sense, this was not archaeology acting as one element of a four-field
anthropology, but attempting to supplant anthropology.
It was Binford himself who reacted against the hubris of this position. Culture-
historic archaeology had made inductive statements about the past, based on
material evidence. The New Archaeology had employed a deductive approach,
but had failed to recognise that its hypotheses related to dynamic systems, while
its evidence took the form of static matter (Binford 1972: 89; Binford 1977: 6).
The project of understanding past societies needed to be separated from that of
rendering the evidence meaningful, and the two required different kinds of theory.
Binfords middle range theory was effectively an artefact physics, intended to
unravel the formation of the archaeological record. This required actualistic
research in the present, in order to identify law-like relationships between forces
and impacts, which Binford compared to Rosetta stones (1983b: 113). Some of
this work could be experimental: a person skilled in flint knapping could generate
observations regarding the sequence of acts involved in making a particular type
of tool, the character of the removals left on the surface of the core, and the nature
of the debitage that would be generated. These could then be used to give
meaning to scatters of knapping debris encountered on archaeological sites. But in
practice, much of Binfords own actualistic research took the form of
ethnoarchaeology, conducted amongst the Nunamiut Eskimo (Binford 1978) and
the Australian Alyawara (Binford 1986). While Binford held that this work had
general significance, the fact that it was conducted in specific cultural settings
rendered it just as analogical as any other form of ethnoarchaeology (Lucas 2001:
192). Moreover, it raises the ethical problems of using contemporary people as a
vehicle for addressing the past in an even more severe form.
Divergent anthropological archaeologies in America and Britain
While the New (or processual) Archaeology was responsible for very
considerable methodological developments, its focus on systems theory and
evolutionary ecology, and consequent neglect of human agency and social conflict
was soon subject to criticism (e.g. Kushner 1970: 131). Moreover, the kind of
anthropological archaeology that it offered was not always highly rated by
anthropologists. Edmund Leach, for instance, provided a negative commentary on
the attempts of archaeologists to construct social models (1973: 767). Leach
maintained that while anthropologists have direct access to social practice,
archaeologists must content themselves with lifeless residues (1977: 166).
However, it is notable that elsewhere Leach was to argue that culture needed to be
decoded, revealing structures and messages that are not self-evident (1976: 2). If
we adopt Leachs structuralist approach, anthropology is just as inferential a
discipline as archaeology, since it is concerned not with the practice itself, but the
structure hidden behind the practice. In America, some commentators began to
question whether archaeology really did have a closer affinity with anthropology
than other disciplines (Gummerman and Phillips 1978: 187). This tendency
accelerated at around the turn of the millennium, with a call for the break-up of the
four-field model of anthropology, and the establishment of separate archaeology
departments in United States universities (Gillespie, Joyce and Nichols 2003:
159). The complaint of some American archaeologists was that while they were
still conducting anthropological research (of an evolutionary, functionalist,
ecological kind), their social and cultural colleagues had embraced post-modern
relativism and ceased to be anthropologists at all (Gosden 1999: 6).
In Britain, entirely different forces had begun to come into play in the later 1970s,
and were to have the effect that archaeology was to take an anthropological turn
just as America was travelling in the opposite direction. Louis Anthussers
structuralist revision of Marxist ideas had had a profound impact on anthropology
in France and Britain, introducing new ways of thinking about economic
relationships in pre-capitalist societies (Godelier 1977: 127). In particular, the
way in which the exchange of highly-ranked valuables can serve to establish
prestige and alliance, and the role of the circulation of goods in relations between
radically different social formations proved extremely suggestive to archaeologists
(e.g. Frankenstein and Rowlands 1978). These ideas connected directly with the
distributions of exotic artefacts that archaeologists routinely investigate, and were
to prove highly influential in the study of both prehistoric societies and early states
(Bradley 1984; Hodges 1982). Yet the renewed engagement with Marxism was to
have other consequences. Both the New Archaeologys use of positivist
philosophies of science that stressed objectivity and value-neutrality and its
ecological functionalism were identified as being linked to the grounding
assumptions of contemporary capitalism (Rowlands 1982: 159). At much the
same time, a series of ethnoarchaeological studies of material culture were
beginning to move in a new direction, concerned with meaning and symbolism
rather than function and taphonomy. For instance, Polly Wiessners work on
artefact style amongst the Kalahari San demonstrated that while in some cases
objects operated to routinely convey information about a persons status, at times
people consciously used their style of dress and adornment to actively negotiate
their social identities (Wiessner 1983: 257; 1984: 195). In a similar study, Roy
Larick described the way that young men amongst the Loikop (Samburu) adopted
styles of spears that positively differentiated them from elder generations (Larick
1986: 279).
The emergence of material culture studies has coincided with a growing concern
with the embodied and physical character of social life within anthropology
(Miller 1998). The past two decades have seen a proliferation of material
ethnographies and archaeologies of the present, and there have been indications in
the past few years that the two are beginning to bleed into one another (Buchli and
Lucas 2001a; Dant 1999; Holtorf and Piccini 2009; Graves-Brown 2000).
However, it has been notable that for much of this period archaeologists and
anthropologists have been carrying on parallel debates on landscape, architecture,
the body, personhood and material culture without talking to each other as much as
they might have done (Henare, Holbraad and Wastell 2007; Carsten and Hugh-
Jones 1995; Lambeck and Strathern 1998; Hirsch and OHanlon 1995). Perhaps
the principal distinction is that archaeologists are likely to approach the nexus of
people and things by starting with the objects. The results can be impressive, as
with Buchli and Lucas (2001b) evocative study of an abandoned council house in
Britain. Despite this, important reservations regarding the whole project of
material culture studies have recently been raised by Tim Ingold (2007: 8). Ingold
points to the way that the notion of material culture enshrines a distinction
between a world of mental representations and one of inert matter, and casts the
practice of making as one in which form is imposed on substance. In its place, he
advocates a concern with human engagement with the world of materials. It
remains to be seen how this shift of emphasis might affect the two disciplines.
At the same time, the merging of archaeology and anthropology found in a more
subtle appreciation of material things is bringing about a re-evaluation of the
perceived asymmetry between the disciplines (Garrow and Yarrow 2010: 9).
Leachs argument that anthropologists have direct access to their subjects has been
slow to die, but there is an increasing recognition that both professions are
concerned with fragmentary evidence (Yarrow 2010: 21). It is even suggested that
if archaeologists have leaned to cope with absence and incompleteness,
anthropologists might have something to learn from them. As we have already
suggested, if human society is understood as a hybrid network composed of people
and things, the main distinction between the two disciplines is that they enter the
network at different points (Lucas 2010: 30). The potential for a productive
dialogue between archaeology and anthropology is greater now than it has been
for decades, but the conversation has barely begun.
References