Interpretation in Archaeological Theory - Springer http://link.springer.com.ezproxy2.library.arizona.edu/referenceworkentry/...

Claire Smith
Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology
10.1007/978-1-4419-0465-2_290
© Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014

Interpretation in Archaeological Theory

Gavin Lucas 1

(1) University of Iceland, Reykjavík, Iceland

Gavin Lucas
Email: gavin@hi.is

Without Abstract

Introduction
The concept of interpretation in archaeology can be understood in many different ways. At one
level, it is a general term used to describe the construction of archaeological knowledge about the
past from evidence surviving in the present; as such, many archaeologists use the term
interchangeably with others, including explanation where no defined qualities are ascribed to either.
However, the term “interpretation” also carries more specific connotations which distinguish it from
explanation, premised on a different perception of what counts as knowledge. This distinction can
be traced back to the nineteenth century and a separation in German scholarship made between the
natural and human sciences as involving two different methods and types of knowledge.
Archaeology has always occupied an uneasy position in this separation, and although on the whole
its roots lie within the humanist tradition, archaeological interpretation rarely explicitly contrasted
itself against explanation until the 1980s with the emergence of postprocessualism. This was largely
as a reaction to the equally explicit development of the concept of explanation under New
Archaeology and processualism in the 1960s and 1970s. As the battle between processualism and
postprocessualism has faded out and more accommodating yet diverse theoretical positions have
become the norm, it is questionable how far the distinction between explanation and interpretation
remains a viable one.

Definition

1 de 15 03/03/2014 04:29 p.m.

Interpretation in Archaeological Theory - Springer http://link.springer.com.ezproxy2.library.arizona.edu/referenceworkentry/...

The concept of interpretation, understood in its specific sense as a mode of knowledge production
within the humanities, emerged under a philosophical stream called hermeneutics, which was
initially a reflection about the interpretation of meaning in ancient texts. In traditional European
scholarship, it was thus closely linked to three different concerns: philology, biblical exegesis, and
the law (Bleicher 1980). In the nineteenth century, however, hermeneutics developed into a more
general philosophical method in Germany, especially through the pivotal influence of Friedrich
Schleiermacher. In Kantian fashion, Schleiermacher attempted to systematize hermeneutics by
defining the possibility and limits of textual interpretation; at the basis of his approach was the
importance of highlighting the reciprocal relationship between authorial intention and the wider
linguistic context. That is, to understand a particular word or phrase in any given text, one needed to
relate the author’s ideas as expressed in that particular instance, with other parts of the text and
even the language as a whole.

Although pivotal, Schleiermacher was only the prelude to the more important figure of Wilhelm
Dilthey who used hermeneutics to provide a theoretical foundation to the humanities as a whole and
in doing so underlined a distinction between the natural and human sciences. Dilthey took the
Kantian model to its ultimate conclusion in his unrealized project of a Critique of Historical
Reason, which replaced the transcendental (i.e., universal) categories of Kant’s pure reason with the
psychological and historical context of particular individuals. In short, human understanding and
knowledge is always mediated by its particular personal and social context. At the core of Dilthey’s
philosophy lies the concept of interpretation (verstehen) as the methodology of the human sciences
(Geisteswissenschaften). Dilthey characterized interpretation as a form of knowledge which emerges
from a first-person perspective on the world – that is, the world as seen from a human being’s point
of view as they are immersed in the world. For Dilthey (and others before him like Giambattista
Vico and Alexander von Humboldt), such a first-person perspective underlined the fact that we can
understand other people because we are one of them. It gives us an insider perspective. He
contrasted this with explanation (erklären) which adopted a third-person perspective, as exemplified
in the natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften). Here, one understands trees or rocks in a different
way; because we are not trees or rocks, we can only ever understand them from an external or
outsider’s point of view.

To illustrate this, consider a person standing by the side of the road hailing a taxi. One way to
understand this situation is in terms of cause and effect between external objects – the raised arm,
the directed gaze of the person, and the shape, color, and markings of the vehicle that stops. This
would be an example of explanation. For Dilthey this was a very limiting way to understand what is
happening; in contrast, we can see this event from the point of view of the person by the roadside or
sitting in the taxi. In this context, the raised arm needs to be understood not as a cause but as an
intention (e.g., “Taxi, stop!”) and the taxi stopping understood as the taxi driver reading that

2 de 15 03/03/2014 04:29 p.m.

Interpretation in Archaeological Theory - Springer http://link.springer.com.ezproxy2.library.arizona.edu/referenceworkentry/...

intention. The cause and effect approach only really offers us a correlation between two events –
the raised arm and a vehicle of a certain type stopping; to fully understand that correlation, we need
to grasp the intentions and meanings inscribed into these events, and this requires adopting an
internal or first-person perspective on the event. This is what is also meant by empathetic
understanding – not some kind of subjective or psychological projection of myself onto another, but
simply to recognize the meaningfully constituted context of those events in the world which involve
human beings.

Although Dilthey developed the concept of interpretation in this way in the nineteenth century, it
was popularized by the sociologist Max Weber in the early twentieth century and used to promote
an interpretive sociology which was to contest the French positivist sociology of Comte and
Durkheim. The French sociological tradition, unlike the German, adopted a much less divided view
on the relation between the natural and social sciences, seeing them more as sharing a similar
methodology and philosophy. However, the German hermeneutic tradition, especially after Weber,
impacted the way sociologists and anthropologists saw their disciplines, and by the middle of
twentieth century, many scholars within the social sciences in the Anglophone tradition increasingly
reflected on the special character of their methods and forms of knowledge. One of the earliest
studies was Peter Winch’s investigation into the nature of social science, linking Weber to
Wittgenstein and which had a massive impact on subsequent social theory (Winch 1958). It provided
the philosophical foundations to the interpretive turn in many of the social sciences such as
anthropology represented in the work of Clifford Geertz from the 1970s and archaeology through
Ian Hodder from the 1980s.

Concurrent with this interpretive turn was the emergence of a new wave of philosophical work in
hermeneutics associated with writers like Emilio Betti, Karl-Otto Apel, Hans-Georg Gadamer,
Jürgen Habermas, and Paul Ricoeur, many of whose ideas were taken up within the social sciences,
including archaeology. Gadamer in particular is discussed further below, but the key development
marked by his work among this group is the extension of interpretation away from being simply a
methodology of the human sciences toward a way of defining human existence. If Dilthey expanded
Schleiermacher’s concept of interpretation from being about texts to defining a method for all
human sciences, Gadamer took it one step further and generalized the concept as a definition of
human understanding and, indeed, human being. In this, Gadamer was heavily influenced by (and
was a student of) Heidegger; just as Dilthey’s concept of verstehen had influenced Husserl (the
founder of phenomenology), Heidegger’s phenomenology later transformed this original concept
into something much broader. It is thus important to note the close historical connections between
the hermeneutic and phenomenological traditions, a connection which one also sees developed in
archaeology through the work of Bjørnar Olsen, Christopher Tilley, and Julian Thomas. On that
note, let us now turn to the more particular historical background of how the concept of

3 de 15 03/03/2014 04:29 p.m.

Interpretation in Archaeological Theory - Springer http://link.springer.com.ezproxy2.library.arizona.edu/referenceworkentry/...

interpretation has been used within archaeology.

Historical Background
Archaeologists rarely if ever explicitly referenced the hermeneutic tradition discussed in the last
section – not until the advent of postprocessualism and the reaction to the logical positivist models
of archaeological knowledge espoused by the New Archaeologists. However, this is not to say that
archaeologists working in the early and mid-twentieth century did not share many of the same
assumptions connected to this tradition; indeed the term interpretation was widely used and was
probably the most common term for the process of archaeological reasoning. The Egyptologist
Flinders Petrie, for example, explicitly paralleled archaeological interpretation with the legal
process, as did the historian and archaeologist R. G. Collingwood. Such perspectives on
archaeological interpretation show a clear link with the humanist tradition and textual interpretation,
especially in the case of Collingwood who developed his own particular brand of historical
interpretation modeled on the hermeneutic concept of verstehen. However, archaeology always
occupied an uneasy position within academic disciplines, straddling a widely held division between
the natural and social sciences. Commonly perceived as a very young discipline (especially
compared to history), its status remained ambiguous; at the same time, for some like Petrie, it was
precisely because of this that archaeology could counter the increasing tendency toward what C. P.
Snow was later to call the two cultures (Petrie 1904: viii).

There was, however, another dimension to this ambiguity. This was in the recognition that
archaeology is not a completely unified discipline, but rather exhibited a major fracture between
prehistoric and (proto-) historical archaeologies, the former lying closer to the natural sciences and
the latter to the humanities. Historically this is well attested as the emergence of prehistoric
archaeology in the mid-nineteenth century was closely aligned with natural scientists like geologists
as against the humanist background of those working in classical and medieval archaeology. This
schism was addressed in depth by the British archaeologist Christopher Hawkes in the mid-twentieth
century (Hawkes 1954). Drawing a distinction between text-free and text-aided archaeology, he
defined different modes of archaeological cognition or interpretation depending on whether textual
sources existed alongside archaeological ones (parahistoric/telehistoric) or not (antehistoric). For
Hawkes these represented very different types of interpretation, one historical and the other
“processual,” and he linked them to his famous ladder of inference. Ultimately of course, even
though he was a prehistorian, Hawkes saw historical interpretation as the richer one because it dealt
with what was more human in human societies.

Hawkes’ views were widely shared by many of his contemporaries, especially in Europe, who, while

4 de 15 03/03/2014 04:29 p.m.

Interpretation in Archaeological Theory - Springer http://link.springer.com.ezproxy2.library.arizona.edu/referenceworkentry/...

recognizing the importance of natural sciences to archaeology, preferred to see their discipline as
part of the humanities, not the natural sciences. Jacquetta Hawkes vociferously argued that the
ultimate goal of archaeology was historical reconstruction and that while the natural sciences formed
a part of archaeology, their role was largely methodological, not theoretical. Her views were
stimulated as a response to the growing influence of New Archaeology within Britain and the
opposite stance which it represented: the subsumption of historical interpretation to styles of
explanation modeled on the natural sciences. In Britain, this shift is more abrupt, but in North
America one can see the transformation taking place more gradually during the preceding decades.
For example, archaeologists like John Bennett and Walter Taylor in the 1940s explicitly defined
interpretation as the ascription of functional or historical meanings to archaeological data, which
Taylor considered as a penultimate stage in the processing of archaeological data, prior to more
generalizing steps such as the construction of chronologies, culture historical syntheses, or cross-
cultural comparative generalization (Taylor 1983). Indeed, sometimes one can see the interpretative
stage as an incipient version of middle range theory, pertaining to the understanding of the
archaeological record in terms of the particular events which created it as opposed to more
generalized syntheses. This is reinforced by Ascher’s later discussion of analogy which aligns
analogy with the interpretive stage of archaeological work, after data collection but prior to
synthesis.

Thus, what for Hawkes and many archaeologists, both in Europe and North America, was the
ultimate goal of archaeology – historical reconstruction – was for a growing number of North
American archaeologists only a middle stage toward a grander goal of scientific explanation,
conceived as cross-cultural generalization. This shift was however gradual, and as a result, the
concept of interpretation became increasingly ambiguous in North America. Thus, while some
authors used the term interpretation to cover all aspects of archaeological reasoning, from
typologies to historical reconstruction, Willey and Philips used the term processual interpretation as
the particular archaeological form of scientific explanation (1958). In Britain, the leading exponent
of New Archaeology David Clarke similarly used the term interpretive theory to refer to a natural
science model of explanation which capped a whole series of lower-level theories relating to
archaeological reasoning (Clarke 1973: 17). It is only with Binford and the New Archaeology in the
1960s that interpretation seems to almost disappear from North American archaeological vocabulary
to be replaced by explanation, a shift that is very emphatic in Binford’s seminal paper “Archaeology
as Anthropology” (1962). This of course is linked to the adoption of logical positivism and the desire
to model archaeological knowledge after philosophies of the natural sciences.

Britain, alongside Scandinavia, was somewhat exceptional in Europe in terms of its reception of the
ideas of New Archaeology. While such theoretical changes from the other side of the Atlantic were
noted, they were nowhere near as influential as in Britain, no doubt in part due to a shared linguistic

5 de 15 03/03/2014 04:29 p.m.

Interpretation in Archaeological Theory - Springer http://link.springer.com.ezproxy2.library.arizona.edu/referenceworkentry/...

and cultural heritage. As a consequence, archaeology and archaeological interpretation remained

closely connected to history, most clearly exemplified in the German tradition which from the 1950s
developed concepts and methods of source criticism and which still forms the dominant disciplinary
matrix today. However, it was precisely because of the stronger reception of New Archaeology in
Britain and the denigration of historical interpretation that when postprocessualism emerged in the
1980s, the concept of interpretation was not only revived but given extended and explicit discussion
in a manner that it had never received before. This is especially striking in contrast to Germany, for
example, where much greater theoretical emphasis focused on control of data quality through source
criticism than interpretation per se, a legacy of the entanglement of Nazism and archaeological
interpretation from the 1930s.

The earliest postprocessual writings which engaged with the concept of interpretation varied in the
attention they gave to it. With Hodder, for example, usage was initially fairly vague, largely because
he drew his main inspiration from the work of Collingwood and his method of empathetic
understanding, which Hodder felt had been misunderstood (Hodder 1986: 94). For Hodder,
Collingwood was simply underlining the importance of acknowledging the meaning content of
events or material culture in the past. Although Hodder uses the term interpretation, it is by no
means a frequent use – it does not even occur in the index to the first edition of his key theoretical
text Reading the Past (1986), unlike the second and third editions. In contrast, Shanks and Tilley
devoted a chapter on hermeneutics and interpretation in their Re-Constructing Archaeology (1987),
where they affirm their role as an alternative to positivism and explanation. They argue that
interpretation moves in a circular or spiral fashion in that archaeologists always bring certain
assumptions or analogies from other contexts into their understanding of archaeological data, and it
is through a dialectical interplay between data and preconceptions about that data that interpretation
develops and moves forward (Shanks & Tilley 1987: 104-5). Drawing on the work of Gadamer, they
emphasized the interpretive basis to human experience, anticipating later articulations by Olsen and
Thomas (see below).

Apart from this brief but important discussion by Shanks and Tilley, the concept of interpretation
within the early postprocessualism of the 1980s remained very much underdeveloped. As a response
to this, the Norwegian archaeologist Bjørnar Olsen with Harald Johnsen published an important
paper addressing the gap, specifically focusing on Hodder’s contextual archaeology in relation to
hermeneutics (Johnsen & Olsen 1992). They highlighted many of the parallels between Hodder’s
theory and hermeneutics, especially the emphasis on an “inner” understanding of material culture,
but they also criticized what they saw as an outdated conception of meaning and pointed out
inconsistencies and contradictions within Hodder’s writings. In ending, they argued for the need to
engage with more recent and theoretically sophisticated hermeneutic writings, singling out Gadamer
as the key figure. They argued that archaeology needs to appreciate better the dialectical relation

6 de 15 03/03/2014 04:29 p.m.

Interpretation in Archaeological Theory - Springer http://link.springer.com.ezproxy2.library.arizona.edu/referenceworkentry/...

between past and present, that our study of the past should act back on our perception of ourselves,
and that modern hermeneutic philosophy can provide a stronger basis for understanding the
production of archaeological knowledge. Their paper was published at one of those ironic moments,
for after it had been written but before it was published, Hodder, as if anticipating this critique,
published a paper in the same journal addressing exactly these concerns (Hodder 1991). In a
postscript, Johnsen and Olsen acknowledge this, and while unable to comment at length, they do
question Hodder’s characterization of hermeneutics as a method as opposed to a philosophical
theory about human existence. This is as aspect taken up later by Julian Thomas (see below).

Hodder’s paper “Interpretive Archaeology and Its Role” engaged with the hermeneutic tradition in a
more direct and explicit manner than his previous texts (Hodder 1991). In part this was driven by
Hodder’s need to distance himself and his brand of postprocessualism from the excesses of
post-structuralist archaeology which many critics from within the processual core were lambasting
as a descent into pure relativism, crippling archaeology from making any kind of authoritative
statements about the past. For Hodder, the recent hermeneutic philosophy from Betti, Gadamer,
Habermas, and Ricoeur provided a way to counter these criticisms, avoiding, as he saw it, the
excesses of both positivism and post-structuralism. Archaeological data thus provided a guarded
objectivity insofar as they represent a reality partially independent of our interpretation and can
resist as much as agree with such interpretations. At the same time, our interpretation of such data is
not guided by external methods of validation but needs to adhere to a principle of internal
coherence between any particular part and the whole – which includes seeing archaeological
remains as the product of human intentionality and agency. Additionally though, interpretation
should also be reflexive and critical of the wider set of background assumptions and traditions
within which archaeologists make their interpretations. These three facets of interpretive
archaeology – objectivity, coherence, and reflexivity – combined to make a powerful alternative to
the processual concept of explanation.

During the 1990s, Hodder’s contextual archaeology thus morphed into an interpretive archaeology;
indeed one might talk more generally of an interpretive turn within postprocessualism during the
last decade of the twentieth century. Two volumes appeared making explicit reference to this
development: one called Interpreting Archaeology (Hodder et al. 1995) and the other called
Interpretative Archaeology (Tilley 1993). Shanks and Hodder suggested that the label interpretive
archaeologies supersede postprocessual archaeology as a way of avoiding polarization in debate.
The concept of interpretation was elaborated further in both volumes, in both similar and different
ways. Ironically though, neither volume gave much explicit attention to hermeneutics but rather
remained closer to a mix of post-structuralist and Marxist theory.

In the later volume, Shanks and Hodder defined interpretation as the understanding of meaning; this
process of understanding, they emphasized, is a dialogue in which both sides (the archaeological

7 de 15 03/03/2014 04:29 p.m.

Interpretation in Archaeological Theory - Springer http://link.springer.com.ezproxy2.library.arizona.edu/referenceworkentry/...

record and the archaeologist) are active. As a process, it is also always ongoing; it never reaches a
conclusion or closure. Indeed, even those statements which appear factual or uncontroversial are
still interpretations; only the interpretive aspect has been black boxed. This in itself is necessary to
enable interpretation to move forward, but at the same time such statements are potentially open to
revision, like any other interpretation. In the earlier volume, however, Tilley took quite a different
view. Tilley gave a broad definition of interpretation as an activity undertaken only in situations
where we are unsure, where something is not immediately obvious. If one sees a figurine of a frog,
one does not interpret it as a frog – it is just perceived directly as a frog. If the figurine exhibits an
ambiguous form on the other hand, we might say it looks like a frog to me, and in that case, we are
interpreting the object. For Tilley, this is why interpretation always remains open to change, lacking
finality, and its “truth” remains dependent on agreement between people rather than on the evidence
– in other words, the figurine is a frog if we all interpret it as a frog.

Tilley’s volume occupies an important moment within postprocessual archaeology, subtly marking
the transition from post-structuralism to phenomenology as a guiding philosophy for its two leading
contributors, Tilley himself and Julian Thomas. In many ways, it also marks the end of explicit
discussion on interpretation within postprocessual archaeology; though short-lived, the series of
papers and volumes mentioned here from the first half the 1990s effectively comprise most of what
has been written on interpretation in archaeology in relation to the hermeneutic tradition. The fact
that little has been written since is perhaps largely due to the fact that epistemic issues in
archaeological theory in general have greatly diminished in importance, at least for those working
out of the postprocessual tradition. Concerns have rather shifted more toward questions of ontology
(Olsen 2010), reflected not only in the emergence of phenomenology from the mid-1990s within
postprocessualism but also in the ontological twist given to the hermeneutic concept of
interpretation, as alluded to by Johnsen and Olsen (1992) and later developed by Thomas (2004a;
see below).

Key Issues/Current Debates

As suggested at the end of the last section, the concept of interpretation has more or less ceased to
generate any new theoretical reflection since the mid-1990s, so there are no real current debates to
speak of. Nonetheless, in this section, I will elaborate on two key issues which relate to the concept
of interpretation and have engendered divided opinion: the hermeneutic circle and the double
hermeneutic. The first has been more central to archaeological discussion, while the latter has only
received very brief attention. In the first, I will explore the tension between those who view the
circle as a method and those who see it in ontological terms, defining something central about

8 de 15 03/03/2014 04:29 p.m.

Interpretation in Archaeological Theory - Springer http://link.springer.com.ezproxy2.library.arizona.edu/referenceworkentry/...

human beings and understanding. In the second, I explore the assumption that would separate the
human/social sciences from the natural sciences based on a conception of reality that is divided,
between a human-centered, inner world of meaning and a material, outer world of objects.

The Hermeneutic Circle

The concept of the hermeneutic circle extends back to the origins of hermeneutic theory with
Schleiermacher and Dilthey, who conceived it on the lines of a part-whole relation, chiefly in
relation to textual interpretation. Parts can be anything from words to text sections, while wholes
can be anything from sentences to a language. The circle describes the necessary working back and
forth between the two so that an accurate understanding of meaning can be achieved. Thus, to
understand an unusual word in an ancient text may require not only assessing it in the context of its
sentence but also how the word is used in other sentences and how this usage might differ between
different authors, literary traditions, and even time periods. It is an ever-widening circle but one that
is also always a back and forth between part and whole. Expressed this way, it describes a method
of interpretation, and it was this part-whole relation that Hodder adopted in his uptake of
hermeneutics and which he illustrated so clearly in his interpretation of a Neolithic enclosure
(Hodder 1999: 32-40). In this case study, he narrates how his interpretation of the excavation
changed over seasons as it shifted back and forth between the evidence and his expectations based
on prior knowledge of such sites. He describes this process not as a circle but a spiral, to emphasize
that the interpretive process is always forward moving, not locked as in a closed loop, a point also
made earlier by Shanks and Tilley (1987: 104). In a sense, this captures the same idea as the notion
of a widening circle mentioned above. At the same time, however, in the process it is not only the
interpretation of the site that has changed but also the general background knowledge about such
sites and perhaps the Neolithic in general. This is why Hodder (and others) often also describes the
process as a dialectic, because in moving back and forth between part and whole, both are
transformed in the process.

However, one of the points made by Johnsen and Olsen in their review of hermeneutics and
Hodder’s version of it is that interpretation is not simply an epistemological concept about the
method of knowledge acquisition, but it is an ontological concept defining something fundamental
about human beings. This was taken from Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics which blended
Heidegger’s phenomenology with the hermeneutic tradition. For Gadamer, Heidegger marks a
turning point in the theory of interpretation, transforming the hermeneutic circle from a
methodological concept to a metaphysical or ontological one. In Being and Time, Heidegger
described the process of interpretation in terms of the relation between fore-understanding and
understanding, where fore-understanding represents our implicit way of seeing the world inherited
from the particular historical tradition we were raised in. In one sense, Heidegger temporalized the

9 de 15 03/03/2014 04:29 p.m.

Interpretation in Archaeological Theory - Springer http://link.springer.com.ezproxy2.library.arizona.edu/referenceworkentry/...

hermeneutic circle – instead of being about the part-whole relation of words to texts, it became a
past/future-present, temporal relation between fore-understanding/expectation and interpretation.
Gadamer adopted this stance in his key work Truth and Method, using the term prejudice for this
fore-understanding.

Julian Thomas developed this ontological view of the hermeneutic circle, citing Gadamer who
characterizes humans as interpreting beings (Thomas 2004a: 24). For Thomas, interpretation is thus
something we are always doing and it applies to all experience; thus in Tilley’s example cited earlier,
when we unhesitatingly see the figurine as a frog, this is just as much an interpretation as when we
consciously decide it is a frog. All acts of experience are enframed within a pre-understanding – we
always see things as something, there can be no raw, unprocessed or uninterpreted experience. Even
if we are uncertain it is a frog, we at least see it as a figurine. For Thomas, this aspect of human
existence, what Heidegger called the as-structure, contradicts Hodder’s notion of even a partial or
guarded objectivity. Quoting Gadamer, Thomas argues that interpretation is a circle we cannot
escape; however, it is not necessarily a vicious circle. While implicit pre-understanding always
informs any experience, any explicit act of interpretation can also alter that pre-understanding and
thus alter our experience of the world. This is a basic issue of contention with the hermeneutic
circle; some see it as a vicious circle, allowing no grounding in any stable or solid point; it is another
version of the post-structuralist play of endless difference. However, the position taken by Gadamer
and Thomas is that the circle actually enables understanding or interpretation in the first place.

The Double Hermeneutic

The concept of the double hermeneutic was coined by the sociologist Anthony Giddens as a way to
characterize a particular consequence of interpretation in the social sciences as distinct from those in
the natural sciences. The notion of a double hermeneutic captures the idea that while social
scientists interpret a particular society, those interpretations can be taken up by the society being
interpreted and thus constitute a second or doubled interpretation (Giddens 1984: 284). For
example, a hypothetical tribal society will have its own interpretation of a certain ritual it performs,
which constitute what might be called a first-order interpretation (e.g., sacrifice to the gods for a
fertile harvest). The anthropologist studying them, however, will typically create a second-order
interpretation to explain this ritual (e.g., releasing social tension); without this second-order
description, it would hardly be anthropology. The same applies to any social science, including
archaeology, where material culture patterning associated with a ritual incorporates aspects of how
people in the past interpreted the ritual themselves. The doubling occurs however when these
second-order interpretations are incorporated by the people being studied so that they become
first-order interpretations. For example, early anthropological accounts of societies may be taken up
by later descendents and integrated into their own sense of tribal identity.

10 de 15 03/03/2014 04:29 p.m.

Interpretation in Archaeological Theory - Springer http://link.springer.com.ezproxy2.library.arizona.edu/referenceworkentry/...

Giddens’ articulation of the double hermeneutic makes explicit the dialectical interplay between two
frames of meaning – the sociologist and the people being studied, and how translation and
interpretation from one to the other runs in both directions. When Giddens originally articulated this,
it was contrasted with the natural sciences where, he argued, the object world does not answer back.
This is highly debatable given recent perspectives within science and technology studies, but it is
interesting that Shanks and Tilley adopted and modified Giddens double hermeneutic into a fourfold
hermeneutic – but in such a way that actually bears no resemblance to Giddens concept of it. For
Shanks and Tilley, archaeology was involved in a quadruple act of interpretation, by which they
effectively meant the overcoming of four levels of distanciation: from our own disciplinary matrix,
from our own social context, to an alien cultural context, and to a past cultural context (Shanks &
Tilley 1987: 107-8). This was a somewhat befuddled attempt to expand Giddens’s original notion,
and few have actually adopted it in archaeology (but see Leone, in Hodder et al. 1995); indeed a
faithful reading of Giddens’ original articulation would ironically have excluded archaeology from
the double hermeneutic, aligning it with the natural sciences.

On the other hand, it raises a problem which Shanks and Tilley perhaps should have addressed,
namely, the question of whether objects do answer back. There are two issues here; the first
concerns the potential of any object of study to be transformed by the act of study itself. This is a
common enough property of any science, from quantum physics to archaeology. The second, more
equivocal issue concerns a separation of meaning (humans, society) from materiality (objects,
nature) as two different orders of phenomena. This separation of course can be traced right back to
Dilthey and Weber who argued for two forms of knowledge and science, one which looked at reality
from an external, causal perspective (natural science/explanation) and the other which looked at
reality from an internal, meaning perspective (social science/interpretation). The distinction also lay
at the basis of Hodder’s contextual archaeology and adoption of Collingwood’s approach to
interpretation as empathetic understanding. In assuming this separation, Giddens was inevitably led
to argue that only when the object of study has the same ontological status as the scientist, i.e. social
phenomena, is there any possibility of answering back. Yet if one avoids the separation of reality
into two orders, then no distinction between a single and double hermeneutic is necessary. Any
science exhibits the dialectical characteristics of the double hermeneutic, but more importantly, the
very term is perhaps redundant insofar as the concept of hermeneutics presupposes the distinction of
two realities – meaning and materiality.

Future Directions
What is the future of archaeological interpretation? For some, interpretation has come to carry a

11 de 15 03/03/2014 04:29 p.m.

Interpretation in Archaeological Theory - Springer http://link.springer.com.ezproxy2.library.arizona.edu/referenceworkentry/...

somewhat negative connotation, whereby it implies nothing is ever what it seems: meaning is always
hidden, always beneath the surface, and always one step away. In Freudian terms, a pipe is never
just a pipe. This hermeneutics of suspicion (Olsen 2006), of depth (Thomas 2004b: 154-7) is largely
the product of a post-structuralist influence on the concept of interpretation, whereby all meaning
becomes completely unhinged from the materiality of the world as it is experienced and is one
reason why interpretation itself has now become suspect. But the concept as originally formulated
does not necessarily need to imply such a connotation. On the other hand, arguably the word
interpretation today is often used loosely and interchangeably with explanation, as it once was
before the processual-postprocessual wars of the 1980s and 1990s. This suggests two not necessarily
unrelated possibilities: either people are just bored of epistemic subtleties or that the basis for the
distinction between explanation and interpretation is simply no longer plausible. Is there really a
divide between the natural and social sciences in terms of their forms of knowledge or orders of
reality? Instead of just two sciences, many now argue for a more heterogeneous disunity to the
sciences, while conversely, others in emphasizing the performative quality of the natural sciences
reveal a continuity between science and other forms of cultural production. This is most apparent in
work that comes under the rubric of postphenomenology, specifically the work of Don Idhe (Idhe
1999, 2009). In archaeology, this shift has manifested itself through the recent rise of interest in a
concept of materiality that does not separate itself from meaning, but as this literature reveals, the
dichotomies generated from the last century are hard to shake off.

It may be some time yet before we see a resolution to this issue, but either way, the concept of
interpretation is unlikely to remain unchanged. The extent to which Hodder’s original adoption of
the distinction between an internal and external type of understanding remains a valid one is hard to
maintain today. Indeed, Hodder’s later articulation of interpretation tended to focus more on the
process or operation of the part-whole relation than this internal-external distinction, which is why
some have suggested a greater commonality between interpretive and explanatory archaeologies. In
many ways then, the concept of interpretation, as described in this chapter, is perhaps already
redundant; if it has a future, it may not be one that separates it from explanation at least.

Cross-References
Hodder, Ian (Theory)

Post-Processual Archaeology

Processualism in Archaeological Theory

12 de 15 03/03/2014 04:29 p.m.

Interpretation in Archaeological Theory - Springer http://link.springer.com.ezproxy2.library.arizona.edu/referenceworkentry/...

References

BINFORD, L. 1962. Archaeology as anthropology. American Antiquity 28(2): 217-25.

BLEICHER, J. 1980. Contemporary hermeneutics. London: Routledge.

CLARKE, D. L. 1973. Archaeology: the loss of innocence. Antiquity 47: 6-18.

GIDDENS, A. 1984. The constitution of society. Cambridge: Polity Press.

HAWKES, C. 1954. Archaeological theory and method: some suggestions from the Old World.
American Anthropologist 56(2): 155-68.

HODDER, I. 1986. Reading the past. Current approaches to interpretation in archaeology.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

- 1991. Interpretive archaeology and its role. American Antiquity 56: 7--18.

- 1999. The archaeological process. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.

HODDER, I., M. SHANKS, A. ALEXANDRI, V. BUCHLI, J. CARMAN, J. LAST & G. LUCAS. (ed.) 1995.
Interpreting archaeology. Finding meaning in the past. London: Routledge.

IDHE, D. 1999. Expanding hermeneutics. Visualism in science. Evanston (IL): Northwestern

University Press.

- 2009. Do things speak? Material hermeneutics, in Postphenomenology and technoscience: 63-80.

Albany (NY): SUNY Press.

JOHNSEN, H. & B. OLSEN. 1992. Hermeneutics and archaeology: on the philosophy of contextual
archaeology. American Antiquity 57(3): 419-36.

OLSEN, B. 2006. Archaeology, hermeneutics of suspicion and phenomenological trivialization.

Archaeological Dialogues 13(2): 144-50.

- 2010. In defence of things. Archaeology and the ontology of objects. Lanham: AltaMira Press.

P ETRIE, F. 1904. Methods and aims in archaeology. London: Macmillan & Co.

SHANKS, M. & C. TILLEY. 1987. Re-constructing archaeology. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press.

13 de 15 03/03/2014 04:29 p.m.

Interpretation in Archaeological Theory - Springer http://link.springer.com.ezproxy2.library.arizona.edu/referenceworkentry/...

TAYLOR, W. 1983. A study of archaeology. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

THOMAS, J. 2004a. The great dark book: archaeology, experience and interpretation, in J. Bintliff
(ed.) A companion to archaeology 21-3. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

- 2004b. Archaeology and modernity. London: Routledge.

TILLEY, C. (ed.) 1993. Interpretative archaeology. Oxford: Berg.

WILLEY, G. & P. PHILLIPS. 1958. Method and theory in American archaeology. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.

WINCH, P. 1958. The idea of a social science and its relation to philosophy. London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul.

Further Reading

DILTHEY, W. 1976. Selected writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

GADAMER, H.G. 1975. Truth and method. London: Sheed & Ward.

- 1977. Philosophical hermeneutics. Berkeley: University of California Press.

RICOEUR, P. 1981. Hermeneutics and the human sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Over 8.5 million scientific documents at your fingertips

© Springer, Part of Springer Science+Business Media

14 de 15 03/03/2014 04:29 p.m.

Interpretation in Archaeological Theory - Springer http://link.springer.com.ezproxy2.library.arizona.edu/referenceworkentry/...

15 de 15 03/03/2014 04:29 p.m.