Introduction

“Ideas … become true only in so far as they help us to get into satisfactory relations with other parts of our experience.” James (1907:48)

An assessment, not unlike the above quote, was made by Bruce Trigger in 1995 when searching for a basis to evaluate knowledge claims in archaeology. In parlance now astonishingly familiar to a discipline of field and dirt, he offered something called ‘moderate relativism’ (1978, 1995, 1998, 2003:144-54). The basis he stood on was something common to all upright simians, a common sense Darwinian perspective which saw knowledge as ultimately adaptive to species survival. The rationale was something like this: if our cognitive ability as humans was not able to cumulatively know reality accurately, then like the blind mole forced out of its adaptive (dark) environment, we would have already blithely walked into traffic heading to extinction. Given the current obvious, our ideas about reality – and perhaps the very notion of reality itself - must at least be ‘adaptively true’.

Knowledge, extinction, Darwin, death – upon first inspection such topics seem reasonably appropriate to archaeological pursuits. Trigger’s evaluation seems to involve some of the very domains of investigation and specialties of the discipline, albeit rearranged and utilized to perspicacious effect. Tool usage and brain capacity both serve as defining markers along the road to homo sapiens sapiens. With a gestalt switch, the two attributes merge into an indissoluble equation of brain-as-tool.

But once the aside of borrowing some schemas from hominid evolution are played out, it must be remembered that Trigger’s discussion was not substantively a thesis about human adaptation; it was a meta-question about the adequacy of archaeological understanding. Subsuming the details of the what/how/why of tools, however they are defined, such meta-level questioning delves into how archaeologists may reasonably know the past. These questions may not seem immediately salient to the discipline of archaeology. Still on guard from the heavy flurry of philosophical meta-questioning surrounding the New Archaeology (Levin 1973, Morgan 1974, Saitta 1983, Schiffer 1981, Watson 1971), what Wylie (2002:108-9, 2006) has labeled the controversy surrounding ‘philosophical imports’, many archaeologists feel its time to get-on with the doing of archaeology (Cowgill 1993, Flannery 1973, 1982), or at the least to merge the rampant theorizing with the dirt and field of practice (eg. Hodder 1991a:8, 1999, Watson 1991:272-3).

Despite these wise caveats, the archaeological niche of meta-archaeology (Embree 1989:34-7, 1992, Wylie 2002:7, 108), or the cumbersome analytic metaarchaeology (Salmon 1993) is well established. Moreover, more recent reflective questioning in archaeology, of both methodological (eg. Hodder 2000, Lucas 2001) and theoretical varieties (eg. Hodder 2001, Hodder 2003), follow from movements in the wider fields of philosophy of science and science studies (Latour 1987, 1979) to ground operational questioning in the actual practices of the disciplines (Hacking 1983:274). This is the ‘don’t say what I do’, ‘see what I do’; especially if you are going to offer advice! Hence practice has become a sort of mantra for those concerned to merge philosophy of science and its new practice-oriented derivatives with the necessities identified within disciplines. For archaeology, Salmon ushered in this new era of embedded philosophy as an effort to reaffirm a relationship which, in 1982, was headed for divorce (1982:180-81).

I am going to follow a similar tact coming from Clarke’s (1973:11-13) call for an ‘internal philosophy’, or, in description of the exemplar of Collingwood (1948), Wylie’s (2002:7,20) ‘amphibious philosophy’, in arguing for the particular convergence of pragmatic reasoning and archaeological practice. Rather than the ‘philosophical importation’ which field archaeologists such Flannery (1982) deplored, I want to track the perhaps key assumption in archaeological reasoning and practice, namely the representation of the past, and suggest that such a guiding focus may no longer be appropriate. In terms of both pragmatic arguments against the incapacity to create accurate ‘mirrorings’ of phenomena and more critically the driving assumption that there is indeed even an incorrigible split between explanation and explanadum necessitating the bridge of representation, and the contemporary plurality of archaeological approaches to knowing the past, I want to highlight that archaeology in large measure already operates in practical concern with a pragmatic sensibility, albeit one that has yet to be articulated. Specifically, while archaeological representation, especially the touchstone mediums of map, drawing, profile, and overall survey and excavation recordation, seems to lodge archaeological techniques within a representational idiom, such practices are evaluated not by how well we may measure their accuracy (the fallacy of ‘new archaeology’s’ methodolatry), but by a more practically oriented pursuit of how they enable further questions and goals to be addressed. For instance, is the map, as the representational medium in archaeology (viz. Lucas 2001:206-211, Webmoor 2005), the substratum of all investigations because it is indisputably accurate in its rendering of a space, or because it is so useful in forming a nodal point to guide and inter-relate all further results of investigation?

Reconfiguring the archaeological sensibility to what works, instead of how we know, is not to undertake a trenchant critique of doctrinal assumptions for judging knowledge claims. This debate has roots going back to the advent of professional archaeology and continues today. It is a healthy part of avoiding the pitfalls of non-reflective research that Clarke (1973) prognosticated would bring the ‘loss of innocence’ for the discipline. But with the subsequent maturation there has been a proliferation of ‘approaches to the past’ overlying divergent and often incompatible goals and interests (Dunnel 1983, Hodder 2001:1-3, Trigger 1989a:xiii, Ucko 1995). Others within and without the discipline have taken a comparative approach to knowledge evaluation within these topic-focused research traditions or communities (eg. Hodder 2003, Kosso 1991, Van Pool 1999, Wylie 2002). Most often, these comparative assessments aim to cohere the divergent approaches on the level of evaluation; at other times there is acrimonious disaccord about evaluative procedures.

To make my purpose clear, I see these debates concerned with evaluation as flawed as they all rest upon a defunct, but deeply ingrained, ultimate goal of representation. While codified with logical-positivist ambitions of direct reference of language to the constituents of reality (under their Semantic Theory of truth), representationalism, as a general correspondence theory of truth, underwrites the basic epistemological project of Western rationality since Descartes (Putnam 1988:19-20, Rorty 1979:3-11, Stroll 2000:5-6,19). With the consequence that the very would-be principle which promises unity for the various communities of practicing archaeologists increasingly fractures them along rationale for achieving Tantalus’ equivalent of Western reason. Instead, digging beneath such a foundational pursuit, a reconfiguring entails building from what goals, questions and methodologies productively lead-to further archaeological investigation. It is the movement to suspend the disaccord of epistemology and give it up. Archaeology in particular is posed at the cross-roads where the urgency from both internal dispersion and external demands is already reconfiguring the discipline.

By the end of the next two chapters, I hope to arrive at a position not unlike Trigger’s above, whereby ideas of the past are guided more by how ideas work for us as archaeologists interested in particular problems posed by experience, rather than evaluated by how well they represent what putatively transpired in the past.

Forward to The Spell of Representation in Archaeological Inquiry

Containments