Post-processual archaeology
Encyclopedia
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. Despite having a vague series of similarities, post-processualism consists of "very diverse strands of thought coalesced into a loose cluster of traditions". Within the post-processualist movement, a wide variety of theoretical viewpoints have been embraced, including structuralism
and Neo-Marxism
, as have a variety of different archaeological
techniques, such as phenomenology
.
The post-processual movement originated in the United Kingdom during the late 1970s and early 1980s, pioneered by archaeologists such as Ian Hodder
, Daniel Miller
, Christopher Tilley
and Peter Ucko
, who were influenced by French Marxist
anthropology
, postmodernism
and similar trends in sociocultural anthropology
. Parallel developments soon followed in the United States. Initially post-processualism was primarily a reaction to and critique of processual archaeology
, a paradigm developed in the 1960s by 'New Archaeologists' such as Lewis Binford
, and which had become dominant in Anglophone archaeology by the 1970s. Post-processualism was heavily critical of a key tenet of processualism, namely its assertion that archaeological interpretations could, if the scientific method
was applied, come to completely objective
conclusions. Post-processualists also criticized previous archaeological work for overemphasizing materialist interpretations of the past and being ethically and politically irresponsible.
In the United States, archaeologists widely see post-processualism as an accompaniment to the processual movement, while in the United Kingdom, they remain largely thought of as separate and opposing theoretical movements. In other parts of the world, post-processualism has made less of an impact on archaeological thought. Various archaeologists have criticized post-processual archaeology, for a variety of reasons.
, and as such had believed that the scientific method
should and could be applied to archaeological investigation, therefore allowing archaeologists to present objective
statements about past societies based upon the evidence. Post-processual archaeology however believed that this was incorrect, and instead emphasized that archaeology was subjective
rather than objective, and that what truth could be ascertained from the archaeological record was often relative to the viewpoint of the archaeologist responsible for unearthing and presenting the data. As the archaeologist Matthew Johnson noted, "Postprocessualists suggest that we can never confront theory and data; instead, we see data through a cloud of theory."
believed that the positivist approach of the processualists, in holding that only that which could be sensed, tested and predicted was valid, only sought to produce technical knowledge that facilitated the oppression of ordinary people by elites. In a similar criticism, Miller and Chris Tilley believed that by putting forward the concept that human societies were irresistibly shaped by external influences and pressures, archaeologists were tacitly accepting social injustice
. Many processualists took this further and criticised the fact that archaeologists from wealthy, western countries were studying and writing the histories of poorer nations in the second
and third world
s. Ian Hodder
stated that archaeologists had no right to interpret the prehistories of other ethnic or cultural groups, and that instead they should simply provide individuals from these groups with the ability to construct their own views of the past. While Hodder's viewpoint was not universally accepted amongst post-processualists, there was enough support for opposing racism
, colonialism
and professional elitism within the discipline that in 1986 the World Archaeological Congress
was established.
A number of post-processualists, such as Michael Shanks
, Christopher Tilley
and Peter Ucko
, undermined "archaeology's claims to be an authoritative source of knowledge about the past", thereby "encourag[ing] people to question and resist all forms of authority… This position was hailed by its supporters as democratizing archaeology and purging it… of elitist pretensions".
, and the culture-historical archaeologists had been idealists
, the post-processualists argued that past societies should be interpreted through both materialist and idealist ideas. As Johnson noted, "Many postprocessualists claim that we should reject the whole opposition between material and ideal in the first place." Whilst recognising that past societies would have interpreted the world around them in a partially materialistic way, the post-processualists argue that many historic societies have also placed a great emphasis on ideology
(which included religion
) in both interpreting their world and influencing their behaviour. Examples of this can be seen in the work of B. Knapp, who examined how the social elite manipulated ideology to maintain their political and economic control, and of Mike Parker Pearson
, who asserted that tools were just as much a product of ideology as were a crown or a law code.
Using an example to explain this belief in materialist-idealist unity, the archaeologist Matthew Johnson looked at the idea of landscape
amongst past societies. He argued that:
in understanding historical societies. Structuralism itself was a theory developed by the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss
(1908–2009), and held to the idea that "cultural patterns need not be caused by anything outside themselves… [and that] underlying every culture was a deep structure, or essence, governed by its own laws, that people were unaware of but which ensured regularities in the cultural productions that emanate from it." At the centre of his structuralist theory, Lévi-Strauss held that "all human thought was governed by conceptual dichotomies, or bilateral oppositions, such as culture/nature, male/female, day/night, and life/death. He believed that the principle of oppositions was a universal characteristic inherent in the human brain, but that each culture was based on a unique selection of oppositions". This structuralist approach was first taken from anthropology and applied into forms of archaeology by the French archaeologist André Leroi-Gourhan
(1911–1986), who used it to interpret prehistoric symbols in his 1964 work, Les Religions de Préhistoire.
Within the post-processual movement, Ian Hodder became "the leading exponent of a structuralist approach". In a 1984 article, he looked at the similarities between the houses and the tombs of Neolithic Europe
, and used a structuralist approach as a basis for his ideas on their symbolism. He then went on, in his seminal book The Domestication of Europe (1990), to use structuralist ideas to come up with his theory that within Neolithic Europe, there was a dichotomy between field (agrios) and house (domus), with this duality being mediated by a boundary (foris).
theory, many post-processualists accepted that most human beings, whilst knowing and understanding the rules of their society, choose to manipulate them rather than following them obediently. In turn, by bending the societal rules, these rules eventually change.
Other post-processualists have instead taken the view of sociologist Karl Marx
(1818–1883) that class conflict
was the force for this social change. In this manner they share similarities with Marxist archaeologists
. A minority of post-processualists, such as Julian Thomas have however argued that human agency is not a useful aspect for looking at past societies, thereby accepting a culturally determinist
position.
emerged as adherents of the second wave feminist movement began to argue that women in the archaeological record had been ignored by archaeologists up until that time. According to archaeologist Sam Lucy, "The agendas of feminist archaeology and post-processualism highlighted the importance of social and political factors on supposedly 'objective' investigation".
), an archaeological alternative to processual archaeology had begun to develop during the 1970s. Some had already anticipated the theory's emergence, with the social anthropologist Edmund Leach informing the assembled archaeologists at a 1971 discussion on the topic of "The Explanation of Culture Change" held at the University of Sheffield
that cultural structuralism
, which was then popular amongst social anthropologists, would soon make its way into the archaeological community.
Bruce Trigger
, a Canadian archaeologist who produced a seminal study of archaeological theory, identified there as being three main influences upon post-processualism. The first of these was "the Marxist
-inspired social anthropology that had developed in France during the 1960s and already had influenced British social anthropology." This, Trigger noted, "had its roots not in orthodox Marxism but in efforts to combine Marxism and structuralism
by anthropologists such as Maurice Godelier, Emmanuel Terray, and Pierre-Phillipe Rey". The second main influence was postmodernism
, which "emphasized the subjective nature of knowledge and embraced extreme relativism and idealism". Having originated amongst the disciplines of comparative literature
, literary criticism
and culture studies, postmodernist thinking had begun to develop within archaeology. The third influence identified by Trigger was the New cultural anthropology movement within the cultural anthropological discipline, which had arisen after the collapse of Boasian anthropology. The new cultural anthropologists "denounced studies of cultural evolution as being ethnocentric and intellectually and morally untenable in a multicultural, postcolonial environment."
(1948-), a former processualist who had made a name for himself for his "significant contributions to the economic analysis of spatial patterns and the early development of simulation studies". Influenced by the 'New Geography' and the works of processual archaeologist David Clarke, "Hodder [had] used statistics and computer simulation to develop a series of spatial models, particularly relating to trade, markets and urbanization in Iron Age
and Roman Britain
... But as time went on and the research progressed Hodder became more and more doubtful that such models and simulations did really 'test' or 'prove' anything. The same pattern or trace in the archaeological record, for example a pottery distribution or network of urban centres, could be produced by a wide range of different simulated processes." In effect, he came to believe that even using the processual approach to understanding archaeological data, there were still many different ways that that data could be interpreted, and that therefore radically different conclusions could be put forward by different archaeologists, despite processualism's claim that using the scientific method
it could gain objective fact from the archaeological record. As a result of this, Hodder grew increasingly critical of the processualist approach, developing an interest in how culture shaped human behaviour. He was supported in this new endeavour by many of his students, including Michael Spriggs.
In 1980 these early post-processualists held a conference at Cambridge University, from which a book was produced, entitled Symbolic and Structural Archaeology (1982), which was edited by Hodder himself and published by Cambridge University Press
. In his introduction to the book, Hodder noted that:
Bruce Trigger considered this book to be "a postprocessual showcase and counterpart to New Perspectives in Archaeology", the 1968 book written by American archaeologist Lewis Binford
(1931-2011) that helped to launch the processual movement.
. As such its primary influence was critical theory, as opposed to the French Marxist anthropology which had been the primary influence upon their British counterparts. Many American archaeologists had begun to recognise issues of bias within the scientific community, and within the processual movement itself which attempted to be scientific. They also began to notice elements of ethnic prejudice within archaeology, particularly in regards to Native American
peoples, who had commonly not had a chance to participate in their own heritage management up until the 1990s. Many American archaeologists also began to take note of a gender
bias in the archaeological interpretation and in the discipline as a whole, as women had been largely marginalised. The 1980s saw archaeological studies finally being published that dealt with this issue, namely through Joan Gero's paper on "Gender bias in archaeology: a cross-cultural perspective" (1983) and Margaret Conkey and Janet Spector’s paper on "Archaeology and the Study of Gender" (1984). Amongst the post-processualists, less emphasis was put on correcting class biases in the American archaeological record than had been put into studying gender and ethnic differences. Instead, it was mostly amongst historical archaeologists
(those who study the archaeology of the historic, or literate period of the past), that such investigation into marginalised classes such as workers and slaves took place.
noted, "For its most severe critics, [post-processualism], while making a number of valid criticisms, simply developed some of the ideas and theoretical problems introduced by [processualism]. To these critics it brought in a variety of approaches from other disciplines, so that the term "postprocessual," while rather neatly echoing the epithet "postmodern" in literary studies, was a shade arrogant in presuming to supersede what it might quite properly claim to complement."
In their article "Processual Archaeology and the Radical Critique" (1987), Timothy K. Earle and Robert W. Preucel examined the post-processual movement's "radical critique" of processualism, and whilst accepting that it had some merit and highlighted some important points, they came to the conclusion that on the whole, the post-processual approach was flawed because it failed to produce an explicit methodology.
Archaeological theory
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...
that emphasizes the subjectivity
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:...
of archaeological interpretations. Despite having a vague series of similarities, post-processualism consists of "very diverse strands of thought coalesced into a loose cluster of traditions". Within the post-processualist movement, a wide variety of theoretical viewpoints have been embraced, including structuralism
Structuralism
Structuralism originated in the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and the subsequent Prague and Moscow schools of linguistics. Just as structural linguistics was facing serious challenges from the likes of Noam Chomsky and thus fading in importance in linguistics, structuralism...
and Neo-Marxism
Neo-Marxism
Neo-Marxism is a loose term for various twentieth-century approaches that amend or extend Marxism and Marxist theory, usually by incorporating elements from other intellectual traditions, such as: critical theory, psychoanalysis or Existentialism .Erik Olin Wright's theory of contradictory class...
, as have a variety of different archaeological
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...
techniques, such as phenomenology
Phenomenology (archaeology)
In archaeology, phenomenology applies to the use of sensory experiences to view and interpret an archaeological site or cultural landscape. It first came to widespread attention among archaeologists with the publication of Christopher Tilley's A Phenomenology of Landscape , in which he suggested it...
.
The post-processual movement originated in the United Kingdom during the late 1970s and early 1980s, pioneered by archaeologists such as 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...
, Daniel Miller
Daniel Miller
Daniel Miller may refer to:* Daniel Miller , anthropologist at University College London* Daniel Miller , cricketer for Surrey County Cricket Club...
, 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....
and Peter Ucko
Peter Ucko
Peter John Ucko FRAI FSA was an influential English archaeologist, noted for being the Professor Emeritus of Comparative Archaeology and also the former Executive Director of University College London's Institute of Archaeology. He was also noted for his organisation of the first World...
, who were influenced by French Marxist
Marxism
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...
anthropology
Anthropology
Anthropology is the study of humanity. It has origins in the humanities, the natural sciences, and the social sciences. The term "anthropology" is from the Greek anthrōpos , "man", understood to mean mankind or humanity, and -logia , "discourse" or "study", and was first used in 1501 by German...
, 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...
and similar trends in sociocultural anthropology
Cultural anthropology
Cultural anthropology is a branch of anthropology focused on the study of cultural variation among humans, collecting data about the impact of global economic and political processes on local cultural realities. Anthropologists use a variety of methods, including participant observation,...
. Parallel developments soon followed in the United States. Initially post-processualism was primarily a reaction to and critique of 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...
, a paradigm developed in the 1960s by 'New Archaeologists' such as Lewis Binford
Lewis Binford
Lewis Roberts Binford was an American archaeologist known for his influential work in archaeological theory, ethnoarchaeology and the Paleolithic period...
, and which had become dominant in Anglophone archaeology by the 1970s. Post-processualism was heavily critical of a key tenet of processualism, namely its assertion that archaeological interpretations could, if 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...
was applied, come to completely objective
Objectivism
Objectivism or Objectivist may refer to:* Any standpoint that stresses objectivity, including;* Philosophical objectivity, realism, the conviction that reality is mind-independent* Moral objectivism, the view that some ethics are absolute...
conclusions. Post-processualists also criticized previous archaeological work for overemphasizing materialist interpretations of the past and being ethically and politically irresponsible.
In the United States, archaeologists widely see post-processualism as an accompaniment to the processual movement, while in the United Kingdom, they remain largely thought of as separate and opposing theoretical movements. In other parts of the world, post-processualism has made less of an impact on archaeological thought. Various archaeologists have criticized post-processual archaeology, for a variety of reasons.
Subjectivism
The post-processualists took an approach to archaeology that was diametrically opposed to that of the processualists. The processualists were positivistsPositivism
Positivism is a a view of scientific methods and a philosophical approach, theory, or system based on the view that, in the social as well as natural sciences, sensory experiences and their logical and mathematical treatment are together the exclusive source of all worthwhile information....
, and as such had believed that 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...
should and could be applied to archaeological investigation, therefore allowing archaeologists to present 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...
statements about past societies based upon the evidence. Post-processual archaeology however believed that this was incorrect, and instead emphasized that archaeology was subjective
Subjective
Subjective may refer to:* Subjectivity, a subject's personal perspective, feelings, beliefs, desires or discovery, as opposed to those made from an independent, objective, point of view** Subjective experience, the subjective quality of conscious experience...
rather than objective, and that what truth could be ascertained from the archaeological record was often relative to the viewpoint of the archaeologist responsible for unearthing and presenting the data. As the archaeologist Matthew Johnson noted, "Postprocessualists suggest that we can never confront theory and data; instead, we see data through a cloud of theory."
Interpretation
Due to the fact that they believe archaeology to be inherently subjective, post-processualists argue that "all archaeologists... whether they overtly admit it or not", always impose their own views and bias into their interpretations of the archaeological data. In many cases, they hold that this bias is political in nature. Post-processualist Daniel MillerDaniel 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...
believed that the positivist approach of the processualists, in holding that only that which could be sensed, tested and predicted was valid, only sought to produce technical knowledge that facilitated the oppression of ordinary people by elites. In a similar criticism, Miller and Chris Tilley believed that by putting forward the concept that human societies were irresistibly shaped by external influences and pressures, archaeologists were tacitly accepting social injustice
Social injustice
Social injustice is a concept relating to the claimed unfairness or injustice of a society in its divisions of rewards and burdens and other incidental inequalities...
. Many processualists took this further and criticised the fact that archaeologists from wealthy, western countries were studying and writing the histories of poorer nations in the second
Second World
The term "Second World" is a phrase used to describe those countries which are allied with or are supported by the "First World" countries . These include countries supported by the United States, such as Colombia, Israel, etc., and those supported by the former Soviet Union, also known as the the...
and third world
Third World
The term Third World arose during the Cold War to define countries that remained non-aligned with either capitalism and NATO , or communism and the Soviet Union...
s. 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...
stated that archaeologists had no right to interpret the prehistories of other ethnic or cultural groups, and that instead they should simply provide individuals from these groups with the ability to construct their own views of the past. While Hodder's viewpoint was not universally accepted amongst post-processualists, there was enough support for opposing racism
Racism
Racism is the belief that inherent different traits in human racial groups justify discrimination. In the modern English language, the term "racism" is used predominantly as a pejorative epithet. It is applied especially to the practice or advocacy of racial discrimination of a pernicious nature...
, colonialism
Colonialism
Colonialism is the establishment, maintenance, acquisition and expansion of colonies in one territory by people from another territory. It is a process whereby the metropole claims sovereignty over the colony and the social structure, government, and economics of the colony are changed by...
and professional elitism within the discipline that in 1986 the World Archaeological Congress
World Archaeological Congress
The World Archaeological Congress is a non-governmental, not-for-profit organization which promotes world archaeology. It is the only global archaeological organisation with elected representation....
was established.
A number of post-processualists, such as Michael Shanks
Michael 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....
and Peter Ucko
Peter Ucko
Peter John Ucko FRAI FSA was an influential English archaeologist, noted for being the Professor Emeritus of Comparative Archaeology and also the former Executive Director of University College London's Institute of Archaeology. He was also noted for his organisation of the first World...
, undermined "archaeology's claims to be an authoritative source of knowledge about the past", thereby "encourag[ing] people to question and resist all forms of authority… This position was hailed by its supporters as democratizing archaeology and purging it… of elitist pretensions".
Materialism and idealism
Whereas the processualists had been firm materialistsMaterialism
In philosophy, the theory of materialism holds that the only thing that exists is matter; that all things are composed of material and all phenomena are the result of material interactions. In other words, matter is the only substance...
, and the culture-historical archaeologists had been idealists
Idealism
In philosophy, idealism is the family of views which assert that reality, or reality as we can know it, is fundamentally mental, mentally constructed, or otherwise immaterial. Epistemologically, idealism manifests as a skepticism about the possibility of knowing any mind-independent thing...
, the post-processualists argued that past societies should be interpreted through both materialist and idealist ideas. As Johnson noted, "Many postprocessualists claim that we should reject the whole opposition between material and ideal in the first place." Whilst recognising that past societies would have interpreted the world around them in a partially materialistic way, the post-processualists argue that many historic societies have also placed a great emphasis on ideology
Ideology
An ideology is a set of ideas that constitutes one's goals, expectations, and actions. An ideology can be thought of as a comprehensive vision, as a way of looking at things , as in common sense and several philosophical tendencies , or a set of ideas proposed by the dominant class of a society to...
(which included religion
Religion
Religion is a collection of cultural systems, belief systems, and worldviews that establishes symbols that relate humanity to spirituality and, sometimes, to moral values. Many religions have narratives, symbols, traditions and sacred histories that are intended to give meaning to life or to...
) in both interpreting their world and influencing their behaviour. Examples of this can be seen in the work of B. Knapp, who examined how the social elite manipulated ideology to maintain their political and economic control, and of Mike Parker Pearson
Mike Parker Pearson
Michael "Mike" Parker Pearson is a professor in the Department of Archaeology at the University of Sheffield in England. His books include The Archaeology of Death and Burial, Bronze Age Britain, Architecture and Order and In Search of the Red Slave...
, who asserted that tools were just as much a product of ideology as were a crown or a law code.
Using an example to explain this belief in materialist-idealist unity, the archaeologist Matthew Johnson looked at the idea of landscape
Landscape
Landscape comprises the visible features of an area of land, including the physical elements of landforms such as mountains, hills, water bodies such as rivers, lakes, ponds and the sea, living elements of land cover including indigenous vegetation, human elements including different forms of...
amongst past societies. He argued that:
- On the one hand, a materialist view of landscape tends to stress how it may be seen in terms of a set of resources, for example for hunter-gathererHunter-gathererA hunter-gatherer or forage society is one in which most or all food is obtained from wild plants and animals, in contrast to agricultural societies which rely mainly on domesticated species. Hunting and gathering was the ancestral subsistence mode of Homo, and all modern humans were...
s or early farming groups. This leads one to turn, for example, to optimal foraging theory and other economic models for an understanding of how people exploited the landscape 'rationally'. Postprocessualists like to argue that landscapes are always viewed in different ways by different peoples. They reject the 'rational' view of 'landscape-as-a-set-of-resources' as that of our own society and one that is ideologically loaded in its own way, loaded towards ideas of commodity and exploitation found in our own society. They suggest that ancient peoples would have had different views of what was 'real' in that landscape. On the other hand, an exclusively idealist view of landscape does not work either. Postprocessualists like to stress that such an understanding of landscape was not formed in the abstract - that the way people moved around and used that landscape affected their understanding of it.
Structuralism
Many, although not all post-processualists have adhered to the theory of structuralismStructuralism
Structuralism originated in the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and the subsequent Prague and Moscow schools of linguistics. Just as structural linguistics was facing serious challenges from the likes of Noam Chomsky and thus fading in importance in linguistics, structuralism...
in understanding historical societies. Structuralism itself was a theory developed by the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss
Claude Lévi-Strauss
Claude Lévi-Strauss was a French anthropologist and ethnologist, and has been called, along with James George Frazer, the "father of modern anthropology"....
(1908–2009), and held to the idea that "cultural patterns need not be caused by anything outside themselves… [and that] underlying every culture was a deep structure, or essence, governed by its own laws, that people were unaware of but which ensured regularities in the cultural productions that emanate from it." At the centre of his structuralist theory, Lévi-Strauss held that "all human thought was governed by conceptual dichotomies, or bilateral oppositions, such as culture/nature, male/female, day/night, and life/death. He believed that the principle of oppositions was a universal characteristic inherent in the human brain, but that each culture was based on a unique selection of oppositions". This structuralist approach was first taken from anthropology and applied into forms of archaeology by the French archaeologist André Leroi-Gourhan
André Leroi-Gourhan
André Leroi-Gourhan was a French archaeologist, paleontologist, paleoanthropologist, and anthropologist with an interest in technology and aesthetics and a penchant for philosophical reflection.- Biography :...
(1911–1986), who used it to interpret prehistoric symbols in his 1964 work, Les Religions de Préhistoire.
Within the post-processual movement, Ian Hodder became "the leading exponent of a structuralist approach". In a 1984 article, he looked at the similarities between the houses and the tombs of Neolithic Europe
Neolithic Europe
Neolithic Europe refers to a prehistoric period in which Neolithic technology was present in Europe. This corresponds roughly to a time between 7000 BC and c. 1700 BC...
, and used a structuralist approach as a basis for his ideas on their symbolism. He then went on, in his seminal book The Domestication of Europe (1990), to use structuralist ideas to come up with his theory that within Neolithic Europe, there was a dichotomy between field (agrios) and house (domus), with this duality being mediated by a boundary (foris).
Human agency
Post-processualists have also adopted beliefs regarding human agency, arguing that in other theoretical approaches to archaeology such as cultural-historical and processual, "the individual is lost", and humans are therefore portrayed as "passive dupes who blindly follow social rules." Post-processualists instead argue that humans are free agents who in many cases act in their own interests rather than simply following societal rules, and by accepting these ideas, post-processualists argue that society is conflict-driven. Influenced by the sociologist Anthony Giddens (1938-) and his structurationStructuration
The theory of structuration, proposed by Anthony Giddens in The Constitution of Society , is an attempt to reconcile theoretical dichotomies of social systems such as agency/structure, subjective/objective, and micro/macro perspectives...
theory, many post-processualists accepted that most human beings, whilst knowing and understanding the rules of their society, choose to manipulate them rather than following them obediently. In turn, by bending the societal rules, these rules eventually change.
Other post-processualists have instead taken the view of sociologist Karl Marx
Karl Marx
Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of social science and the socialist political movement...
(1818–1883) that class conflict
Class conflict
Class conflict is the tension or antagonism which exists in society due to competing socioeconomic interests between people of different classes....
was the force for this social change. In this manner they share similarities with Marxist archaeologists
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...
. A minority of post-processualists, such as Julian Thomas have however argued that human agency is not a useful aspect for looking at past societies, thereby accepting a culturally determinist
Cultural determinism
Cultural determinism is the belief that the culture in which we are raised determines who we are at emotional and behavioral levels. This supports the theory that environmental influences dominate who we are instead of biologically inherited traits....
position.
Marginalised archaeologies
Post-processualism places great emphasis on encouraging marginalised groups to interact with archaeology.Gender archaeology
In the 1960s and 1970s, feminist archaeologyFeminist 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...
emerged as adherents of the second wave feminist movement began to argue that women in the archaeological record had been ignored by archaeologists up until that time. According to archaeologist Sam Lucy, "The agendas of feminist archaeology and post-processualism highlighted the importance of social and political factors on supposedly 'objective' investigation".
Precedents
Although it would not be actually termed "post-processual archaeology" till 1985 (by one of its most prominent proponents, Ian HodderIan 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...
), an archaeological alternative to processual archaeology had begun to develop during the 1970s. Some had already anticipated the theory's emergence, with the social anthropologist Edmund Leach informing the assembled archaeologists at a 1971 discussion on the topic of "The Explanation of Culture Change" held at the University of Sheffield
University of Sheffield
The University of Sheffield is a research university based in the city of Sheffield in South Yorkshire, England. It is one of the original 'red brick' universities and is a member of the Russell Group of leading research intensive universities...
that cultural structuralism
Structural anthropology
Structural anthropology is based on Claude Lévi-Strauss' idea that people think about the world in terms of binary opposites—such as high and low, inside and outside, person and animal, life and death—and that every culture can be understood in terms of these opposites...
, which was then popular amongst social anthropologists, would soon make its way into the archaeological community.
Bruce Trigger
Bruce Trigger
Bruce Graham Trigger, was a Canadian archaeologist, anthropologist, and ethnohistorian.Born in Preston, Ontario, he received a doctorate in archaeology from Yale University in 1964. His research interests at that time included the history of archaeological research and the comparative study of...
, a Canadian archaeologist who produced a seminal study of archaeological theory, identified there as being three main influences upon post-processualism. The first of these was "the Marxist
Marxism
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...
-inspired social anthropology that had developed in France during the 1960s and already had influenced British social anthropology." This, Trigger noted, "had its roots not in orthodox Marxism but in efforts to combine Marxism and structuralism
Structuralism
Structuralism originated in the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and the subsequent Prague and Moscow schools of linguistics. Just as structural linguistics was facing serious challenges from the likes of Noam Chomsky and thus fading in importance in linguistics, structuralism...
by anthropologists such as Maurice Godelier, Emmanuel Terray, and Pierre-Phillipe Rey". The second main influence was 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...
, which "emphasized the subjective nature of knowledge and embraced extreme relativism and idealism". Having originated amongst the disciplines of comparative literature
Comparative literature
Comparative literature is an academic field dealing with the literature of two or more different linguistic, cultural or national groups...
, literary criticism
Literary criticism
Literary criticism is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often informed by literary theory, which is the philosophical discussion of its methods and goals...
and culture studies, postmodernist thinking had begun to develop within archaeology. The third influence identified by Trigger was the New cultural anthropology movement within the cultural anthropological discipline, which had arisen after the collapse of Boasian anthropology. The new cultural anthropologists "denounced studies of cultural evolution as being ethnocentric and intellectually and morally untenable in a multicultural, postcolonial environment."
Origins in Britain
Post-processual archaeology began in Britain during the late 1970s, spearheaded by a number of British archaeologists who had become interested in aspects of French Marxist anthropology. Most prominent amongst these was Ian HodderIan 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...
(1948-), a former processualist who had made a name for himself for his "significant contributions to the economic analysis of spatial patterns and the early development of simulation studies". Influenced by the 'New Geography' and the works of processual archaeologist David Clarke, "Hodder [had] used statistics and computer simulation to develop a series of spatial models, particularly relating to trade, markets and urbanization in Iron Age
British Iron Age
The British Iron Age is a conventional name used in the archaeology of Great Britain, referring to the prehistoric and protohistoric phases of the Iron-Age culture of the main island and the smaller islands, typically excluding prehistoric Ireland, and which had an independent Iron Age culture of...
and Roman Britain
Roman Britain
Roman Britain was the part of the island of Great Britain controlled by the Roman Empire from AD 43 until ca. AD 410.The Romans referred to the imperial province as Britannia, which eventually comprised all of the island of Great Britain south of the fluid frontier with Caledonia...
... But as time went on and the research progressed Hodder became more and more doubtful that such models and simulations did really 'test' or 'prove' anything. The same pattern or trace in the archaeological record, for example a pottery distribution or network of urban centres, could be produced by a wide range of different simulated processes." In effect, he came to believe that even using the processual approach to understanding archaeological data, there were still many different ways that that data could be interpreted, and that therefore radically different conclusions could be put forward by different archaeologists, despite processualism's claim that using 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...
it could gain objective fact from the archaeological record. As a result of this, Hodder grew increasingly critical of the processualist approach, developing an interest in how culture shaped human behaviour. He was supported in this new endeavour by many of his students, including Michael Spriggs.
In 1980 these early post-processualists held a conference at Cambridge University, from which a book was produced, entitled Symbolic and Structural Archaeology (1982), which was edited by Hodder himself and published by Cambridge University Press
Cambridge University Press
Cambridge University Press is the publishing business of the University of Cambridge. Granted letters patent by Henry VIII in 1534, it is the world's oldest publishing house, and the second largest university press in the world...
. In his introduction to the book, Hodder noted that:
- During the early period of exploration and development of ideas, premature conference presentations and individual seminars were given by various members of the Cambridge group in other archaeological departments in England and abroad. Individual scholars who were invited to talk to us in Cambridge in that period often felt, understandably, obliged to maintain a distinct opposition. While it is certainly the case that these presentations had occurred before our views had even begun to settle down, and that they were excessively aggressive, they played an important role in the process of enquiry and reformulation. In particular, the contrasts which were set up by us and by outside scholars allowed the views of the seminar group, and the differences of viewpoint within the group, to be clarified. The opposition highlighted our own opinion but also threw the spotlight on the blind alleys down which there was a danger of straying. Our aggression resulted from the conviction that we were doing something new. This, too, was important. In the initial period there was a clear idea of what was wrong with existing approaches and there was a faith that something else could be done.
Bruce Trigger considered this book to be "a postprocessual showcase and counterpart to New Perspectives in Archaeology", the 1968 book written by American archaeologist Lewis Binford
Lewis Binford
Lewis Roberts Binford was an American archaeologist known for his influential work in archaeological theory, ethnoarchaeology and the Paleolithic period...
(1931-2011) that helped to launch the processual movement.
Development in the United States
Post-processual archaeology developed largely independently amongst the archaeological community in the United StatesUnited States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
. As such its primary influence was critical theory, as opposed to the French Marxist anthropology which had been the primary influence upon their British counterparts. Many American archaeologists had begun to recognise issues of bias within the scientific community, and within the processual movement itself which attempted to be scientific. They also began to notice elements of ethnic prejudice within archaeology, particularly in regards to Native American
Indigenous peoples of the Americas
The indigenous peoples of the Americas are the pre-Columbian inhabitants of North and South America, their descendants and other ethnic groups who are identified with those peoples. Indigenous peoples are known in Canada as Aboriginal peoples, and in the United States as Native Americans...
peoples, who had commonly not had a chance to participate in their own heritage management up until the 1990s. Many American archaeologists also began to take note of a gender
Gender
Gender is a range of characteristics used to distinguish between males and females, particularly in the cases of men and women and the masculine and feminine attributes assigned to them. Depending on the context, the discriminating characteristics vary from sex to social role to gender identity...
bias in the archaeological interpretation and in the discipline as a whole, as women had been largely marginalised. The 1980s saw archaeological studies finally being published that dealt with this issue, namely through Joan Gero's paper on "Gender bias in archaeology: a cross-cultural perspective" (1983) and Margaret Conkey and Janet Spector’s paper on "Archaeology and the Study of Gender" (1984). Amongst the post-processualists, less emphasis was put on correcting class biases in the American archaeological record than had been put into studying gender and ethnic differences. Instead, it was mostly amongst historical archaeologists
Historical archaeology
Historical archaeology is a form of archaeology dealing with topics that are already attested in written records. These records can both complement and conflict with the archaeological evidence found at a particular site. Studies tend to focus on literate, historical-period societies as opposed...
(those who study the archaeology of the historic, or literate period of the past), that such investigation into marginalised classes such as workers and slaves took place.
Criticism
As the archaeologists Colin Renfrew and Paul BahnPaul Bahn
Paul G. Bahn is a British archaeologist, translator, writer and broadcaster who has published extensively on a range of archaeological topics, with particular attention to prehistoric art...
noted, "For its most severe critics, [post-processualism], while making a number of valid criticisms, simply developed some of the ideas and theoretical problems introduced by [processualism]. To these critics it brought in a variety of approaches from other disciplines, so that the term "postprocessual," while rather neatly echoing the epithet "postmodern" in literary studies, was a shade arrogant in presuming to supersede what it might quite properly claim to complement."
In their article "Processual Archaeology and the Radical Critique" (1987), Timothy K. Earle and Robert W. Preucel examined the post-processual movement's "radical critique" of processualism, and whilst accepting that it had some merit and highlighted some important points, they came to the conclusion that on the whole, the post-processual approach was flawed because it failed to produce an explicit methodology.