‘Traditional’ archaeology and initial introspection

With the professionalization of the discipline early in the 20th-century, much early archaeology was self-consciously inductive in that the first priority for the new discipline was to acquire a sufficiently large data base from which to infer patterns – such as typologies and chronological seriation. Unsurprisingly, such emergent reasoning, or letting the amassed data ‘speak for itself’, was both a logical and chronological extension of the antiquarian collecting which presaged the discipline. Such inferential reasoning was intended, under the strictures of what would later be criticized as ‘narrow empiricism’, to restrict theoretical or abstract imposition upon the data; rather, the proposed ideas of archaeologists were to be limited to descriptions of the archaeological record (Willey and Sabloff 1993:ch.4, Trigger 1989:204, Wylie 2002:32). With the few notable exceptions of Scandinavian and Soviet archaeology programs mentioned by Trigger (1989:ch.6), the evaluation of archaeological claims was consciously restricted to representing the ‘cultural-historical’ units of past society. While modest, the simplistic inductive reasoning grouping archaeological data into discreet geographical and chronological ‘cultures’ was vehemently defended by some (Laufer 1913) as the only measure of insuring accurate representation undistorted by contemporary theoretical frameworks against those (eg. Kluckhohn 1939) who urged the move beyond description to hypothetical inference.

Anticipating later ‘new archaeology’ admonishments for non-inductive, or at least not narrowly empirical, evaluative procedures, early ‘normative’ archaeologists such as Dixon (1913) and later Caldwell (1959) called for the end of a-theoretical archaeology and suggested the need for hypothetico-deductive testing of archaeological theories. Simple geographical and chronological reconstructions of the past were disparaged as the theoretically uninformed extension of curios collecting. Instead, questions relevant to “the relations of things, with the whens the whys and the hows” were forwarded for both description and explanation (Dixon 1913:565, Strong (1936). These early critics of strictly descriptive and inductive procedures for representing past culture-histories targeted ‘fuller’ archaeological endeavors with the attempts of reconstructing more anthropological processes of change, growth, adaptation and functioning of cultures (Willey and Sabloff 1993: 153, Wylie 2002:30-31). This reformulation of representational goals dovetailed with the larger rethinking of the concept of culture within anthropology, influentially advocated by Steward (1955)and White (1949), amongst others. Earlier archaeologists, particularly North Americans, had assumed a concept of culture passionately forwarded by Boas (1944). In his schema, culture was foremost ideational and idiosyncratic, with material culture objectifying such ephemeral templates. Consequently, archaeology could accurately represent past cultures by descriptively and typologically sorting artifacts into distinct types of culture. Though not as simple as artifact=culture, contrary to later theoretical baselines such assemblages of artifacts need not be inserted into proposed, encompassing socio-economic processes.

With the functional turn in anthropology and archaeology, past culture was no longer equated with present artifact typologies. This move towards more systemic, holistic conceptions of culture (concomitant with a rediscovery of Marx and Durkheim formulations of society, cf. Trigger 1989:245) complicated the representational strategy of archaeology. No longer the inductive correlation from artifact patterning to culture, the aim of representing more complex, inter-related and non-observable processes which comprised the newly-formulated culture concept posed new epistemological challenges.

Extending the already extant induction versus theoretical models for testing controversy, such challenges to culture representation merged with a period of introspection for the discipline. Though detailed, culture-historical approaches remained popular within nation-states focused upon representing the succession of culture within contemporary political borders (Trigger 1989: 205-06), pan-Atlantic ‘reflexive’ debates developed in the 1930’s and ‘40’s regarding the veracity of archaeological representation itself. Such debates were most clearly manifest in the categorization or ‘typology debate’ (Wylie 2002:ch.2); a disciplinary refraction of the long-standing ‘nominalism’ versus ‘conceptual realism’ controversy. Essentially, were typological schemes which archaeologists based upon formal variations of artifacts directly indicative of inherent past culture traits; or were such schemes on the ‘source side’ of explanation, utilized for heuristic purposes to organize material culture according to interests inherent in the archaeologists? The various positions situated along this spectrum were polarized by Ford (1954) and ‘constructivism’ and Spaulding (1953) with a ‘commonsense objectivism’. Constructivism embraced what would later be explicitly formulated as the theory-ladeness of archaeological interpretation in describing the typological schemes archaeologists employed as ‘tools’ for imposing order on what would otherwise be non-ontologically distinguishable material. Archaeologists, interested in certain questions, inevitably impose a subjective ordering on the continuum of artifact assemblages that could not definitively be ascertained to obtain in the reality of the archaeological record (ibid:391).

Against this subjective position, the objective stance viewed such orderings by archaeologists as merely making manifest, or ‘discovering’, what was inherent in the record. Rejecting theory-ladeness or the subjective ordering imposed by archaeologists, these scholars assumed the independence of the observer from the real world (Spaulding 1953:304-5). This assumed relationship of independence, finding common currency amongst influential logical-positivist philosophers of science of the time (eg. Carnap 1947), argued that archaeologists merely represent in their classifications an order already present in the artifact distributions. Not unexpectedly, the majority of archaeologists opted for a middle-ground between the two positions (Wylie 2002:51). Such a middle-position seemed to be the most workable solution to the dilemma, allowing archaeologists to continue to create typologies, so central to the operation of the discipline, without accepting either of the two threatening specters of relativism or naïve empiricism. Yet the typological debate might be seen as a fulcrum for representational issues in archaeology due to its silhouetting contrast of subjective-objective factors in explanation. Later debates in the discipline, particularly with ‘new archaeologists’ (eg. Binford 1963) and post-processualists (eg. Hodder 1982b, Hodder 1984: 25-8, Shanks 1992:ch.7), would indeed stand between the same contrastive light as a testament to the obdurate nature of the issue.

Forward to ‘New’ archaeology and explicit reasoning

Containments

Return to The Spell of Representation in Archaeological Inquiry