‘New’ archaeology and explicit reasoning

The opening of the row over representation and its epistemological status regarding typology amongst the ‘traditional’ archaeologists magnified during the subsequent plumbing of epistemological issues of ‘new archaeology’. Observers such as Trigger 1989:ch.7-8) and Wylie (2002:part2-3) have summarized in detail the historical context and theoretical program of the paradigm. For issues pertaining to representation, several key theoretical re-orientations must be adumbrated. Continuing the rejection of a ‘normative’ conception of culture, the ‘new archaeologists’ adopted a functional-adaptive, materialist conception of culture underwritten by the neo-evolutionism of White, Steward and Harris, or, in the case of Childe, a Marxist orientation (Binford 1962, 1972, Childe 1958, Clark 1939). Aligned with systems theory approaches (eg. Flannery 1968:74-85), the explanatory goal of archaeology was to re-construct the extra-somatic adaptation processes and their interrelations which constituted culture. Consequent upon a processual notion of culture, which demanded a steep move beyond chronological-geographical description, theories of explanation and methodology were revamped in order to meet the heightened demands of a properly anthropological archaeology. Foremost amongst these reformulations was an explicit rejection of the ‘simple induction’ attributed to ‘traditional’ archaeology. The ‘sequential’ approach of inductive accounts (Wylie 2002:57), whereby the accumulation of archaeological data would eventually reveal patterns relevant to culture, was seen as inadequate, especially given a model of culture driving material culture patterning rather than directly corresponding with such manifest material. Rather, explanation was to be avowedly ‘problem oriented’, identifying features to be investigated beforehand, utilizing the hypothetico-deductive procedures self-consciously adopted from the logical-positivism of Hempel (Fritz 1970, Hempel 1965, Watson 1971). Epistemic independence between source-side (archaeologist) and subject-side (archaeological record) was the initial goal of such an explanatory strategy, allowing for verification of hypotheses representing selected aspects of past cultural processes. Such hypotheses posited causal regularity between the observable record and supposed governing laws which accounted for the record’s particularities. Non-refutation of such hypotheses strengthened the belief in the subsuming covering laws (per Hempel) which generalized regularities between the observed archaeological record and governing physical processes, ideally confirming (beyond strictly Humean co-occurrence) the posited processes responsible for past cultural functioning (on par with the new archaeologists concept of culture).

Whether or not such explanatory strategies were coherently followed or even feasible given the operational necessity of a host of background assumptions (Binford 1982, Hodder 1984:25-7, Levin 1973, Wylie 2002:78-86, cf. Quine 1994:42-46 'web of beliefs'), the aspiration was cumulative representation of the unobservable systematics or processes causally responsible for the vagaries of past culture systems. As arguments mounted within archaeology against the untenable division of theory-observation which hypothetico-deductive ‘independent’ testing required as well as a host of other critiques regarding the applicability of the logical-positivist account of inquiry to archaeology (a process of the ‘catching-up’ of archaeological philosophy with post-Kuhnian philosophy of science), a range of alternative explanatory theories proliferated (Wylie 2006:8). Additionally, the assumptions of the environmental-economic engine driving cultural functioning and change were realized to be far too simplistic (Trigger 1989:332-34). Rather than bounded entities adapting to largely external (environmental) stimuli, inter-societal contact and influence on a materialist and ideational level, of the type espoused by Wallerstein’s (1974) ‘world systems theory’, was incorporated into a more highly theorized notion of culture. The restriction of theoretical elaboration (due to logical-positivists denial of theoretical realism (Hacking 1983:48-9, Stroll 2000:64-86)) to testable, and hence discreet and identifiable hypotheses which a Hempelian deductive approach required, seemed to leave staunch advocates of ‘new archaeology’ with the constrained task of reconstructing ‘Mickey Mouse laws’ (eg. Flannery 1982 and Schiffer 1976).

Cumulatively, the shift towards a more complex reconstructive goal of archaeology concomitant with the criticism of new archaeology’s representational capacity led to two general movements in Anglo-American archaeology. Both were responses mirroring larger social scientific shifts gravitated by the philosophical vacuum left by the decline of positivist doctrines. One largely remained scientific-realist in its outlook while incorporating the challenges to a hyper-scientific enterprise (eg. Clarke 1968, Cowgill 1993, Kelley 1988, Renfrew 1982, Trigger 1989b). Such archaeologists and theorists followed the larger trend of Critical Realism in the social sciences, the appeal being to maintain a model of the natural sciences as the working platform and legitimation for the social sciences, yet one unencumbered by the defunct positivist epistemology (Baert 2005:88-9). At a time when archaeology was receiving more institutional support due to the discipline’s perceived grounding in natural science (Patterson 1986), this ‘don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater’ maneuver proved adroit to the majority of Anglo-American archaeologists.

Yet critically, aside from the more radical departures from ‘new archaeology’ and its scientific-realist accounts of explanation (with critical and post-processual approaches discussed below) these new accounts of explanation remained tied to the effort of reducing present (interpreter) bias in objectively representing the past. In addition to the systems and covering law strategies already discussed, the focus of sustained discussion from both internal theorists and external (philosophers) commentators turned to causal modeling and a renewed discussion of analogical reasoning (Salmon 1982:160-65,Wylie 2006:9, Wylie 2002:91-6). Both types of explanatory strategies consciously shifted away from deductive procedures to inductive, or properly ‘ampliative inference’ (cf. Wylie 2002:63). And both are generally inter-related as ethnographic analogy was often utilized inferentially to construct models for past behaviour. Ranging widely from top-level, organizing conceptual models driving investigation (such as concepts of culture dynamics), to mid-level models purporting to mimic inter-site socio-economic processes and site distributions, to low-level, restrictive types modeling intra-site activity, these behavioral models greatly vary in terms of spatial and temporal scale and applicability. As advocated by the outspoken supporters (Clarke 1972, Renfrew 1973), such models would enable the systematization of observables in the record along with representing the ‘internal’ mechanisms accounting for the artifactual traits. Despite the revamping of the an neo-evolutionary concept of culture, directing attention to more complex notions of culture as a complex web of interactional systems, technological progress in the informational systems of computing allowed the requisite unwieldy models to be subsumed within computational formulae. In this instance of contemporary capabilities, modeling has remained very popular, especially amongst those utilizing computer-aided modeling (Aldenderfer 1987, Archaeology 2003, Richards 1985).

While a controversy ensued with respect to purely ‘descriptive’ models merely providing correlations between observables and presumed mechanisms versus ‘explanatory’ models with theoretically inferred mechanisms allowing for empirical testing of observables against the predictions of the model, the attraction of modeling was the idea of ‘building up’ detailed representations of past dynamic cultural systems (Clark 1972:1-4, Wylie 2002:91-4).

Allowing for the enrichment of ‘source-side’ abduction, analogical inference from ethnographic contexts could, when cautiously utilized to avoid ethnocentrism, compliment modeling by proposing the causal mechanisms responsible for observables systematized by the model. However, the caveats surrounding the ‘reaction against analogy’ (Wylie 2002:ch.9) center upon the possibility of obfuscation in archaeological representation due to presentist bias. While analogy taken from ethnographic accounts (eg. Longacre 1974) or ethnoarchaeological studies (eg. Binford 1978) aid in inferential modeling, the staunchest critics, particularly those adhering to a deductivist stance (Gould 1982), worried that analogy, even direct-historic examples where culture continuity might be established, always over-extended the possibility of testing such analogy against the archaeological record. Thus analogical reasoning could provide no basis for eliminating contemporary biases from the archaeologist’s representation of past culture. With later more trenchant critiques of the scientific-realist enterprise in archaeology, such issues raising the possibility of inter-meshing of past-present would return in post-processual accounts of the inneliminability of contemporary concerns in archaeological representation of the past.

Forward to Interpretive archaeology and new importation

Containments

Return to ‘Traditional’ archaeology and initial introspection