Anth 321W Intellectual Background of Archaeology

1. Anth 321WIntellectual Background of Archaeology MWF 9:00-9:55AM 008 Life Sciences Bldg

2. Anglo-American Marxist Archaeology • Marx is a starting point, not an end • Social relations are fundamental • Society is a whole, not parts • Contradiction and conflict are sources of change. • The dialectic approach rejects the notion that society is a set of functional adaptations to external conditions. • Human action (praxis) is significant in creating history. • Technological and environmental determinism are rejected. • People create knowledge • Knowledge of the past depends on socio-political context. • Modern power relations questioned.

3. Processualism:Culture as extrasomatic adaptationChange not sui generis White Binford Ideology Economy Technology Environment

4. Post-processual/Interpretive • Mosaic of theoretical positions and goals • No strict creed or intellectual messiah • What purposes are served by the creation of archaeological knowledge? • Who is it for and how has it been used? • Material culture plays a role in how we make social relationships • Individuals must be a part of theories of material culture and social change • Archaeology has close explanatory ties with history • Tends to draw on post-modern theories of history.

5. Processual and postprocessual dominated theoretical debate • Concepts excluded by both camps now appear important • Neither processual nor postprocessual are sharply defined approaches. They are clusters of related non overlapping positions.

6. Darwinian or Evolutionary Archaeology • Seeks to explain both human behavior and the material culture using the concepts of biological evolution. • Freed evolutionary anthropology from assumptions of unilinearity and teleological development associated with neoevolutionism.

7. Cognitive Archaeology • How innate factors influence human behavior. • Revival nineteenth-century evolutionary anthropology’s ‘psychic unity’

8. Other recent approaches/directions • Behavioral archaeology (Shiffer) • New Marxist archaeology of Spain • Function does not preclude an interest in change (Evans-Pritchard1949, 1962) then new Marxism is similar to Evolutionary Archaeology • Why does Trigger bring up the issue of FUNCTION? • Cultural-historical revival (Kehoe)

9. Processual/Post-processual Debate &The Great Theoretical Divide Postrocessual • Idealist • Postmodern • Romanticism • Romantics inspired by Herder celebrated diversity • Strum and Drang • humanistic • Processual • Materialist • Modernism • Enlightenment • 19th C Evolutionists studied regularity • rationality and stoicism • scientific

10. Processual/Post-processual debate • The fact that different theoretical approaches are mutually comprehensible and selectively integrated indicates that these are not paradigms. • Paradigms are incommensurate—one paradigm cannot be clearly understood by someone working in the context of an alternate paradigm. • Treating theoretical orientations as paradigms encourages exclusion and polemic rather than comparison and synthesis.

11. Thomas Khun (1962):Structure of Scientific Revolutions • Khun sought to explain development of scientific knowledge over time. • Paradigm shifts rather than slow unilinear progress. • Paradigm shifts open up fundamentally new ways of understanding a subject. • Paradigms are incommensurate. • Comprehension never fully objective; must account for subjective perspective as well.

12. All aspects of archaeological research are influenced by assumptions that constitute implicit theory. • Better to deal with these assumptions consciously than to leave them implicit. • High-level theory necessary for a mature self-critical discipline.

13. Possibilism and Determinism • Trigger describes how geographic possibilism helped him avoid the trap of environmental determinism that plagued early processualism. Environment sets limits and offers possibilities for personal and cultural development. Yet, humans can selectively respond to any factor in a number of ways. How a people react and develop is a function of the choices they make in response to their environment. Paul Vidal de La Blache

14. Comparison and cross-cultural research • Early comparisons focused on a search for regularities between cultures. • Kingship • Irregular aspects of culture were essentially ignored. • Variation in the nature of rulership

15. Trigger’s Conclusion • No theoretical formulation involving a narrow range of causal factors will likely account for the totality of human behavior or material expressions • Comparative approach required consideration of idiosyncrasies and similarities • Theoretical conclusion: processual and postprocessual approaches based on antithetical positions, but they are complementary