Paula Sabloff's book “Conversations with Lew Binford,” which consists of
various interviews with the esteemed archaeologist at the end of his career,
commences with Binford’s critique of culture-historical methodology. He writes:
“You just fit your observations to your conventions. Then you put them together. Your conventions literally gave conventional meaning to what you saw. And that was something that I was not willing to work with right from the very beginning” (1998: 6).
In this context, he is specifically problematizing the ways in
which Classificatory-Descriptive archaeologists have traditionally identified
migration versus diffusion.
Binford’s
own method of processual archaeology, however, does not escape this paradigm.
His conventions may be based on ethnographic and experimental analogies, but he
succumbs to the same types of circular reasoning as his predecessors. He
writes:
“…the old archaeology said they knew what it all meant. There was a series of conventions that when you see this, it means that, and most any of those conventions could be knocked down. This is what we did in the early ‘60s: show you that there are three or four different ways that you could get the same patterning” (1998: 19).
While introducing greater variability into
interpretation was an important step for archaeological theory, I agree with Tilley’s
stipulation that Hodder’s
work rather than Binford’s was responsible for a paradigm shift in the
discipline (1989). Processualism simply expands a 1:1 cause:effect ratio rather
than eliminating it altogether.
For
example, Binford focused a great deal on mortuary practice, arguing that
complexity of mortuary practice correlated positively with complexity of the
society. First of all, the entire premise upon which this thesis is founded
inherently imposes a linear trajectory of the kind imposed by Lewis Henry
Morgan. The term “complexity,” as it relates to archaeology, suggests that a
diverse material culture can be used as a proxy for a diverse society, with
implications that such a society is inherently superior to one that is “less
complex.” This diversity in society is generally characterized by an extensive
division of labor and large population, both of which tend to result in
increasing technological advances and entrenched social hierarchies. I would
argue, however, that in actuality these surface types of diversity cannot
account for the diversity in mindsets and ideas: in other words, those
immaterial categories at the top of the ladder of inference. The notion that
the archaeological record can be used to theorize about ideology can be
attributed to post-processualism.
Even
if “complexity” is accepted as a viable barometer, there is still the problem
of assuming that some societal “cause” produced the material culture “effects.”
Shanks and Tilley’s book chapter “Ideology, Symbolic Power and Ritual
Communication: A Reinterpretation of Neolithic Mortuary Practices,” within
Hodder’s 1982 volume Symbolic and
Structural Archaeology, can provide one post-processual point of view to
problematize this supposition. They examine communal burials in barrows, which
would traditionally have been construed as evidence of a non-hierarchical, not
complex society. The authors instead argue, however, “Mortuary practices do not
just reflect, they also invert and misrepresent” (1982: 152). Therefore, the
act of burying the dead en masse could be seen as one of denying an existent
stratification in socioeconomic relations. This abandonment of Binford’s
convention that mortuary practice is a reification of these relations, which is
reflected in the archaeological record, is one example of the real paradigm
shift in archaeological theory.
