Archaeology often appears to mean different things, from the particular to the general, in different contexts. At one extreme it can refer to the recovery of ancient remains by excavation, ‘digging up pots and bones’. But even field archaeology now includes a wide range of activities from survey, the cleaning and recording of industrial machines (industrial archaeology), underwater archaeology to air photography. Excavation itself involves both archaeological concepts such as context, association and assemblage, and external techniques, such as methods of probing below the surface soil with magnetometers, pollen analysis to reconstruct past environments, and data processing with computers. More generally, archaeology is often used to refer to what archaeologists do, including what is more property termed prehistory or history. All reconstruction of the past which is based on material remains other than written records might be termed archaeology. Yet within historical archaeology use is often made of written records as part of the interpretative process. The boundary between archaeology and history (including prehistory) is blurred, because the interpretation of layers on a site is closely dependent on accumulated knowledge about what went on at any particular place and time in the past. Since there are few Pompeiis, and archaeological remains are typically fragmentary and ambiguous, the burden on theory is great. Theories and paradigms often change with little contradiction from the data. There is much scope for historical imagination.
Views differ as to the degree of rigour and certainty that can be obtained in reconstructing the past from archaeological remains, at least partly in relation to whether one thinks archaeology is really an historical or an anthropological science. Unfortunately, the two approaches have normally been opposed. Those who claim that the purpose of archaeology is historical emphasize the particularity of past cultures, the unpredictability of human action, and the role of individuals. They state that each past culture has its own value system which it is difficult for archaeologists to reconstruct with any confidence. Prehistory and archaeology are interpretative by nature. For those who claim that ‘archaeology is anthropology or it is nothing’, and who believe in the cross-cultural method, allied with positivism and with laws of evolution and systematic relationships, rigorous explanation of events in past societies is feasible. The concern with scientific explanation has been particularly strong in the USA, but the two views of archaeology, as history or science, have a long tradition in the discipline.
The history of archaeology
Speculation about the human past began in classical antiquity, but investigation of monuments and artefacts dates back to the Renaissance and increased markedly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as part of national interests, pride and identity. This early archaeology had its origin in the study of oriental and classical antiquities such as Pompeii, the recording of European monuments such as Stonehenge and Carnac, and the interest in human origins as an outcome of developments in geology and biology.
The initial concern was to establish a chronological sequence, and in the early nineteenth century in Denmark C.J.Thomsen grouped antiquities into stone, bronze and iron and gave them chronological significance, while J.J.A.Worsaae provided stratigraphical evidence for the sequence. The scheme was argued on ethnographic grounds to relate to a development from savagery to civilization. This idea of Sven Nilsson was, in the second half of the nineteenth century, developed by Sir Edward Tylor and Lewis H.Morgan, and it influenced Marx and Engels. An evolutionary emphasis in archaeology was, in the debates about the origins of humankind, also closely linked to Charles Darwin.
In this early period of archaeology, an evolutionary approach was closely allied to a cross-cultural emphasis, scientific optimism, and notions of progress from barbarism to industrial societies. Yet in the early twentieth century, and particularly after the First World War, the main concern in archaeology became the building up of local historical sequences, the identification of cultural differences and the description of the diffusion and origin of styles and types, V.Gordon Childe crystallized earlier German and English uses of the term culture and defined it as a recurring association of traits in a limited geographical area. These spatial and temporal units became the building blocks for the definition of local historical sequences and the diffusion of traits. Childe described the prehistory of Europe as at least partly the result of diffusion from the Near East, ‘ex Oriente lux’.
But Childe was already responsible for reintroducing an evolutionary emphasis in European archaeology by taking up Morgan’s scheme, while in the USA Julian Steward and Leslie White embraced similar ideas. Rather than describing sites, processes were to be examined. In particular, attention focused on the economic relationships between a site and its environment. The work of Grahame Clark in Europe and Willey and Braidwood in the USA pioneered this new, functional, integrative approach which owed much to developments in anthropology. The discovery of physical dating methods such as radiocarbon (C14) measurement freed the archaeologist from a reliance on typology, types, cultures and associations in establishing chronologies.
A full mixture of evolutionary theory, anthropology, and science in archaeology was attempted in the ‘New Archaeology’, a development of the 1960s and 1970s, spearheaded by Lewis Binford in the USA and David Clarke in Britain. Although there were many differences between these and other New Archaeologists, the overall concern was to introduce scientific, rigorous methods of explanation into archaeology. Rather than describing what happened in the past (the perceived view of earlier, historical approaches in archaeology), they tried to explain why events occurred. Ethnography and anthropology provided the theories for the explanation of past events, and a subdiscipline, ‘ethnoarchaeology’, developed in order to study more closely the relationship between material culture residues and processes in the living world. From such studies they hoped to build laws of cultural process from which particular archaeological occurrences could be deduced. They frequently referred to positivism and Hempel’s hypothetico-deductive method.
The current scene
Much archaeology, particularly in the USA, remains within the grip of ecological functionalism, evolutionary theory and positivism, in the aftermath of the New Archaeology. The enduring concerns have been with process, the application of systems theory, positivism and scientific methods, including the widespread use of computers for the storing and sorting of field data, statistical manipulations, taxonomy and simulation. Cemeteries are examined in order to identify age, sex and status groupings as part of ‘social archaeology’, and settlement data are searched for organizational clues. Evolutionary theory is referred to in the definition of bands, tribes, chiefdoms and states and in discussions of the transformation of these categories through time. There are both Neo-Darwinian and Neo-Marxist schools.
Yet for many archaeologists, particularly in Europe, archaeology remains an historical discipline. Many field archaeologists, funded by central or local government or by development contractors, find that the academic rhetoric of their university colleagues has little relevance to their problems and interests. The split between theory and application is widening. Similarly, museum curators are aware that popular interest centres on local and regional historical continuity, and on the material achievements of foreign cultures, rather than on cross-cultural laws of social process. In addition, many academic archaeologists cling to the historical tradition in which they had been taught and reject the claims of the New Archaeology. An emerging feeling in archaeology is that the old battle between historical and scientific-anthropological views of the past is inadequate. The concern is to allow the particularity of historical sequences, and the individuality of culture, while at the same time focusing on social process and cultural change.
Ian Hodder
University of Cambridge
Further reading
Barker, P. (1983) Techniques of Archaeological Excavation, London.
Binford, L. (1972) An Archaeological Perspective, New York.
Renfrew, C. and Bahn, D. (1991) Archaeology: Theories, Methods and Practice, London.
Trigger, B. (1989) A History of Archaeological Thought, Cambridge, UK.
