Archaeological theory
Encyclopedia
Archaeological theory refers to the various intellectual frameworks through which archaeologists
interpret archaeological data. There is no one singular theory of archaeology, but many, with different archaeologists believing that information should be interpreted in different ways. Throughout the history of the discipline, various trends of support for certain archaeological theories have emerged, peaked, and in some cases died out. Some archaeological theories, such as processual archaeology
, holds that archaeologists are able to develop accurate, objective
information about past societies by applying the scientific method
to their investigations, whilst others, such as post-processual archaeology
, dispute this, and claim that all archaeological data is tainted by human interpretation and social factors, and that any interpretation that they make about past societies is therefore subjective
.
Other archaeological theories, such as Marxist archaeology
, instead interpret archaeological evidence within a framework for how its proponents believe society operates and evolves.
)
People's interest of the past has existed since antiquity. During the Western world's Medieval period six main concepts were formed that would come to influence archaeological theory to some degree:
1) The world is of recent, supernatural origin at best no more than a few thousand years old
2) The physical world has degraded since God's original creation
3) Humanity was created in the Garden of Eden
4) Standards of human conduct naturally degrade
5) History of the world is a sequence of unique events
6) Culturally, socially, and intellectually the people of the past were identical to the present
The coming of the Renaissance stimulated an interest in the past but it was more on the level of collecting artifacts and romanticized theories of their origin. It was not until the 19th century the first elements of actual systematic study of older civilizations began but they tended to be designed to support imperial nationalism.
; the idea 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 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 revolution
s 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 cities
. Such macro-scale thinking was in itself revolutionary and Childe's ideas are still widely admired and respected.
, 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 culture
s had taken precedence over the people being studied themselves. It was becoming clear, largely through the evidence of anthropology, that ethnic group
s and their development were not always entirely congruent with the cultures in the archaeological record
.
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.
, Christopher Tilley
, Daniel Miller
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.
is practised.
or Marxist-influenced archaeologists in the USSR
and the UK
(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
, agency theory
, cognitive science
, functionalism, gender-based
and Feminist archaeology
and Systems theory
.
Archaeology
Archaeology, or archeology , is the study of human society, primarily through the recovery and analysis of the material culture and environmental data that they have left behind, which includes artifacts, architecture, biofacts and cultural landscapes...
interpret archaeological data. There is no one singular theory of archaeology, but many, with different archaeologists believing that information should be interpreted in different ways. Throughout the history of the discipline, various trends of support for certain archaeological theories have emerged, peaked, and in some cases died out. Some archaeological theories, such as processual archaeology
Processual archaeology
Processual archaeology is a form of archaeological theory that had its genesis in 1958 with Willey and Phillips' work Method and Theory in American Archeology, in which the pair stated that "American archaeology is anthropology or it is nothing" , a rephrasing of Frederic William Maitland's...
, holds that archaeologists are able to develop accurate, objective
Objective
Objective may refer to:* Objective , to achieve a final set of actions within a given military operation* Objective pronoun, a pronoun as the target of a verb* Objective , an element in a camera or microscope...
information about past societies by applying the scientific method
Scientific method
Scientific method refers to a body of techniques for investigating phenomena, acquiring new knowledge, or correcting and integrating previous knowledge. To be termed scientific, a method of inquiry must be based on gathering empirical and measurable evidence subject to specific principles of...
to their investigations, whilst others, such as post-processual archaeology
Post-processual archaeology
Post-processual archaeology, which is sometimes alternately referred to as the interpretative archaeologies by its adherents, is a movement in archaeological theory that emphasizes the subjectivity of archaeological interpretations...
, dispute this, and claim that all archaeological data is tainted by human interpretation and social factors, and that any interpretation that they make about past societies is therefore subjective
Subjectivity
Subjectivity refers to the subject and his or her perspective, feelings, beliefs, and desires. In philosophy, the term is usually contrasted with objectivity.-Qualia:...
.
Other archaeological theories, such as Marxist archaeology
Marxist archaeology
Marxist archaeology is an archaeological theory that interprets archaeological information within the framework of Marxism. Whilst neither Karl Marx nor Freidrich Engels described how archaeology could be understood in a Marxist conception of history, it was developed by archaeologists in the...
, instead interpret archaeological evidence within a framework for how its proponents believe society operates and evolves.
Antiquarianism (antiquities collection) and Imperial synthesis (ancient times through c1880)
(see also: History of archaeologyHistory of archaeology
The history of archaeology has been one of increasing professionalism, and the use of an increasing range of techniques, to obtain as much data on the site being examined as possible.-Origins :...
)
People's interest of the past has existed since antiquity. During the Western world's Medieval period six main concepts were formed that would come to influence archaeological theory to some degree:
1) The world is of recent, supernatural origin at best no more than a few thousand years old
2) The physical world has degraded since God's original creation
3) Humanity was created in the Garden of Eden
4) Standards of human conduct naturally degrade
5) History of the world is a sequence of unique events
6) Culturally, socially, and intellectually the people of the past were identical to the present
The coming of the Renaissance stimulated an interest in the past but it was more on the level of collecting artifacts and romanticized theories of their origin. It was not until the 19th century the first elements of actual systematic study of older civilizations began but they tended to be designed to support imperial nationalism.
Cultural-historical (Historical Particularism, National Archeology) archaeology (c1860-present)
After Darwin came the concept of cultural, or culture historyCultural-history archaeology
Culture-historical archaeology is an archaeological theory that emphasises defining historical societies into distinct ethnic and cultural groupings according to their material culture...
; the idea 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
History
History is the discovery, collection, organization, and presentation of information about past events. History can also mean the period of time after writing was invented. Scholars who write about history are called historians...
. Cultural historians employed the normative model of culture
Normative model of culture
The normative model of culture is the central model in culture history, a theoretical approach to cultures in archaeology, anthropology and history. In essence it defines culture as a set of shared ideas, or norms....
, 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
Sherd
In archaeology, a sherd is commonly a historic or prehistoric fragment of pottery, although the term is occasionally used to refer to fragments of stone and glass vessels as well....
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 whereby new ideas moved, through social and economic ties, from one culture to another.
The Australian archaeologist Vere Gordon Childe
Vere Gordon Childe
Vere Gordon Childe , better known as V. Gordon Childe, was an Australian archaeologist and philologist who specialised in the study of European prehistory. A vocal socialist, Childe accepted the socio-economic theory of Marxism and was an early proponent of Marxist archaeology...
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 revolution
Revolution
A revolution is a fundamental change in power or organizational structures that takes place in a relatively short period of time.Aristotle described two types of political revolution:...
s had wrought major changes in past societies. He conjectured a Neolithic Revolution
Neolithic Revolution
The Neolithic Revolution was the first agricultural revolution. It was the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture and settlement. Archaeological data indicates that various forms of plants and animal domestication evolved independently in 6 separate locations worldwide circa...
, 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
Urban revolution
In anthropology and archaeology, the Urban Revolution is the process by which small, kin-based, nonliterate agricultural villages were transformed into large, socially complex, urban societies....
that created the first cities
City
A city is a relatively large and permanent settlement. Although there is no agreement on how a city is distinguished from a town within general English language meanings, many cities have a particular administrative, legal, or historical status based on local law.For example, in the U.S...
. 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 BinfordLewis Binford
Lewis Roberts Binford was an American archaeologist known for his influential work in archaeological theory, ethnoarchaeology and the Paleolithic period...
, 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
Processual archaeology
Processual archaeology is a form of archaeological theory that had its genesis in 1958 with Willey and Phillips' work Method and Theory in American Archeology, in which the pair stated that "American archaeology is anthropology or it is nothing" , a rephrasing of Frederic William Maitland's...
). Processualists borrowed from the exact sciences the idea of hypothesis
Hypothesis
A hypothesis is a proposed explanation for a phenomenon. The term derives from the Greek, ὑποτιθέναι – hypotithenai meaning "to put under" or "to suppose". For a hypothesis to be put forward as a scientific hypothesis, the scientific method requires that one can test it...
testing and the scientific method
Scientific method
Scientific method refers to a body of techniques for investigating phenomena, acquiring new knowledge, or correcting and integrating previous knowledge. To be termed scientific, a method of inquiry must be based on gathering empirical and measurable evidence subject to specific principles of...
. 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 culture
Culture
Culture is a term that has many different inter-related meanings. For example, in 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a list of 164 definitions of "culture" in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions...
s had taken precedence over the people being studied themselves. It was becoming clear, largely through the evidence of anthropology, that ethnic group
Ethnic group
An ethnic group is a group of people whose members identify with each other, through a common heritage, often consisting of a common language, a common culture and/or an ideology that stresses common ancestry or endogamy...
s and their development were not always entirely congruent with the cultures in the archaeological record
Archaeological record
The archaeological record is the body of physical evidence about the past. It is one of the most basic concepts in archaeology, the academic discipline concerned with documenting and interpreting the archaeological record....
.
Behavioural archaeology
An approach to the study of archaeological materials formulated by Michael B. SchifferMichael Brian Schiffer
Michael Schiffer is one of the founders and pre-eminent exponents of behavioral archaeology. Schiffer's ideas, set out in his 1976 book Behavioral Archaeology and a number of journal articles, are mainly concerned with site formation processes...
in the mid 1970’s that privileged the analysis of human behaviour
Human Behaviour
"Human Behaviour" is Icelandic singer Björk's first solo single, taken from the album Debut. It contains a sample of "Go Down Dying" by Antonio Carlos Jobim. The lyrics reflect on human nature and emotion from a non-human animal's point of view. The song is the first part of a series of songs that...
and individual actions, especially in terms of the making, using, and disposal of material culture
Material culture
In the social sciences, material culture is a term that refers to the relationship between artifacts and social relations. Studying a culture's relationship to materiality is a lens through which social and cultural attitudes can be discussed...
. 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 ShanksMichael Shanks (archaeologist)
Michael Shanks is a British archaeologist who has specialized in Classical archaeology and archaeological theory. He received his BA and PhD from Cambridge University, and was a lecturer at the University of Wales, Lampeter before moving to the United States of America in 1999 to take up a Chair...
, Christopher Tilley
Christopher Tilley
Chris Tilley is a British archaeologist known for his contributions to postprocessualist archaeological theory. He is currently Professor of Anthropology and Archaeology at University College London....
, Daniel Miller
Daniel Miller (anthropologist)
Daniel Miller is an anthropologist most closely associated with studies of our relationships to things and the consequences of consumption. His theoretical work was first developed in Material Culture and Mass Consumption and is summarized more recently in his book Stuff...
and Ian Hodder
Ian Hodder
Ian Hodder FBA is a British archaeologist and pioneer of postprocessualist theory in archaeology that first took root among his students and in his own work between 1980-1990...
. 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
Scientific method
Scientific method refers to a body of techniques for investigating phenomena, acquiring new knowledge, or correcting and integrating previous knowledge. To be termed scientific, a method of inquiry must be based on gathering empirical and measurable evidence subject to specific principles of...
dictates. Exponents of this relativistic method, called post-processual archaeology
Post-processual archaeology
Post-processual archaeology, which is sometimes alternately referred to as the interpretative archaeologies by its adherents, is a movement in archaeological theory that emphasizes the subjectivity of archaeological interpretations...
, 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-fields 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 http://www.ucl.ac.uk/prehistoric/past/past26.html#Nashville and this last approach is common in other countries where commercial Cultural Resources ManagementCultural resources management
In the broadest sense, Cultural Resources Management is the vocation and practice of managing cultural resources, such as the arts and heritage. It incorporates Cultural Heritage Management which is concerned with traditional and historic culture. It also delves into the material culture of...
is practised.
The impact of ideology
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. MarxistMarxism
Marxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...
or Marxist-influenced archaeologists in the USSR
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
and the UK
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
(among others) often try to prove the truth of dialectical materialism
Dialectical materialism
Dialectical materialism is a strand of Marxism synthesizing Hegel's dialectics. The idea was originally invented by Moses Hess and it was later developed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels...
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
Three-age system
The three-age system in archaeology and physical anthropology is the periodization of human prehistory into three consecutive time periods, named for their respective tool-making technologies:* The Stone Age* The Bronze Age* The Iron Age-Origin:...
to argue continuous upward progress by Western civilisation. Much contemporary archaeology is influenced by neo-Darwinian evolutionary thought, phenomenology, postmodernism
Postmodernism
Postmodernism is a philosophical movement evolved in reaction to modernism, the tendency in contemporary culture to accept only objective truth and to be inherently suspicious towards a global cultural narrative or meta-narrative. Postmodernist thought is an intentional departure from the...
, agency theory
Structure and agency
The question over the primacy of either structure or agency in human behavior is a central debate in the social sciences. In this context, "agency" refers to the capacity of individuals to act independently and to make their own free choices. "Structure", by contrast, refers to the recurrent...
, cognitive science
Cognitive archaeology
Cognitive archaeology is a sub-discipline of archaeology which focuses on the ways that ancient societies thought and the symbolic structures that can be perceived in past material culture....
, functionalism, gender-based
Gender archaeology
Gender archaeology is a method of studying past societies through their material culture by closely examining the social construction of gender identities and relations...
and Feminist archaeology
Feminist archaeology
Feminist archaeology employs a feminist perspective in interpreting past societies. It often focuses on gender, but also considers gender in tandem with other factors, such as sexuality, race, or class. Feminist archaeology has critiqued the uncritical application of modern, Western norms and...
and Systems theory
Systems theory in archaeology
Systems theory in archaeology is the application of systems theory and systems thinking in archaeology. It originated with the work of Ludwig von Bertalanffy in the 1950s, and is introduced in archaeology in the 1960s with the work of Sally R. Binford & Lewis Binford's "New Perspectives in...
.