Danger of the Sublime

Leone (2009) writes, “We cannot assume that a sublime object exists. A sublime object is our state, scientific truth apart from politics, or our museums, for example” (162). I agree with the author insofar as objects do not and cannot stand alone. Rather, they are necessarily inscribed with and embed social relationships, often hierarchical ones that privilege one group or individual over another. In the case of historical archaeology, which in contrast to classical archaeology, was initially a product of archaeologists in European colonies (particularly the United States) rather than Europe itself. Therefore, from its inception historical archaeology has sought to enfranchise those who are traditionally disenfranchised, those who have not profited (monetarily or otherwise) from European capitalism. Through examination of the archaeological record, one can call into question traditional histories, which privilege the written word and by extension those in power who have largely created it.

            As Leone discusses through the lens of Castañeda’s work, archaeological sites, as reconstructions of a past for tourist consumption, are seen as sublime and are therefore colonial in of themselves. The example given by Castañeda is Chichén Itzá, the prominent Maya site in the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico. By emphasizing this particular created past, the Classic Maya, those responsible for heritage inherently force the people currently inhabiting that region to relate themselves to that history. In this way, modern Maya peoples have historically been seen by anthropologists as, in Castañeda’s terms, having “zero degree culture” (163). That is, because they are no longer constructing the monumental stone temples or writing in the glyphic languages that are valorized by the Western world, they have somehow regressed. Cultural heritage is, therefore, challenging because by definition, it aims to preserve the past. In order to do so, however, it is necessary to choose which particular past should be preserved. This selection process often occurs within colonial frameworks, resulting in the construction of narratives that culminate in the zenith that is Western civilization (e.g. Greece) or those that run in direct opposition to it and are curiosities due to their representations of the Other (e.g. the Maya).

            Because of the materiality of archaeological evidence, there is a tendency to imbue artifacts and even entire sites with a supernatural, sublime quality. If not problematized, this capacity can easily promote a colonial agenda. As archaeologists, we therefore must work in tandem with cultural resource managers to situate these objects within postcolonial narratives, making room for, as Leone emphasizes, emotional responses to the marginalization embedded within them.

Postcolonizing

In the article "Making Historical Archaeology Postcolonial," Mark Leone discusses a way in which historical archaeology may be useful as a means to combat colonial rhetorics and establish new knowledge for dealing with identity and the cultural self. First to discuss postcolonial, let's first consider what even is colonialism? As discussed in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Colonialism is a practice of domination, which involves the subjugation of one people to another." So presumably, if we are to discuss any archaeology as postcolonial, we are assuming an archaeological practice void of one entity subjugated to another. Is this possible? Leone seems to believe so.

He positions historical archaeology as a discipline of remembrance:

"No one thinks the forgotten are forgotten by clerical error. They are forgotten because they were said to be dangerous, inconvenient, numerous, aggressive, controlled land or resources that others wanted, or were the laborers whom others sought. One basis for historical archaeology is the correction of injustice and behind that is the anger that such an injustice has existed and continues."

This notion is problematic because it assumes that the historical archaeology merely remembers, rather than likewise forgetting him/herself. The choice of studying a particular entity by another, is that any different than a colonial mindset? Can the act of studying another be a-colonial? For example, he purposes historical archaeology as an occurrence of "giving voice to the voiceless." However, is this any different than Said's problematization of Orientalism as an effort by one body controlling the rhetoric of another? Yes, the archaeologist may be sympathetic to that external entity, but nonetheless by 'giving voice' to it, it seems a precarious notion to consider one as postcolonial when doing so. 

Archaeology is rather a means of acknowledging and coming to terms with a past, but the issue at hand is which one? The exploitation of the past by archaeologists is a purely capitalizing effort to relate the present to it, thusly reconfiguring the past in present terms. The past is a commodity: 

"Because it is essential that people feel and rationally articulate the tie between who they are and exactly why they are here now, in the condition they find themselves touched by, people seek constant exposure to legitimizing, textured, figured, and refigured pasts."

People use pasts. The past is subjugated by present actions, considerations, regards, and selective remembering and forgetting. It is paradoxical to then assume the act of remembering as postcolonial, or reconfiguring the past to reveal what was otherwise left forgotten. To place the discipline in such terms is just as much a colonizing effort as it was before archaeology became postcolonial. Leone concludes: 

"...self-knowledge can be raised to a level of consciousness by exhibiting material culture in organized settings, which may help produce meanings not hitherto available to those who could use them, both ourselves and others."

But can we ever know the self, especially when that 'self' is not an individual person, but a collection of people. There will always be a selective act of inclusion when describing the selfness of a culture, nationality, any group of people more than one. Perhaps if archaeology were to be truly postcolonial, one would have to acknowledge that any examination under the discipline of Archaeology is inherently an act of colonization. 

Cause and Effect in Archaeology

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.  

We Are the Neanderthal

Oscar Wilde once said, "Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power." This mantra is perfectly upheld in the way in which research on neanderthals permeates the public sphere. Much news of early Homo sapiens remains from Israel has been triggered on the notion that it could have been among the first anatomically modern humans to have sex with neanderthals. This fascination with interbreeding comes out of the precariousness of a competitor to modern humans, commonly viewed as the teleological end point to evolution. Any threat to that clean viewpoint has difficulty gaining acceptance. It is for this reason that neanderthals have for so long and continue to endure the cave man brute stereotype.

If it was not the humans who engaged in a bloody war to defeat the neanderthals to gain their rightful place as rulers of this domain, then what happened? This is the question that surrounds much publicity of middle paleolithic archaeology. Dying out quietly for a species is not exciting however, but sex is. Thus, there is relatively extensive media coverage of that encounter. It is an implicit desire by contemporary society to still see the human species on top (no pun intended). In accordance with the statement of Wilde, inter-species sex is about power. The encounter between a neanderthal and human may have been peaceful, but nevertheless, a modern human, rather than a neanderthal was born from it.

There is also an academic and public rhetoric that is uncomfortable with seeing anything other than humans having agency and cognition. For much of human history how humans have distinguished themselves: agents and actors with high-level cognition. Everything else is secondary and the other. But evidence problematizing this notion is difficult to reckon with because it gives way to the much feared identity crisis of humankind.

The resulting conservative treatment of hominids in the Middle Paleolithic is one akin to the socially conservative rhetoric observed in America, and the perversity of sexuality. However, this mindset crucially dictates the mindset with which we deal with the study of these early hominids, or 'photo-humans.' It becomes a perverse discourse in the media realm whereby readership is secured through the alluring taboo of the sexual encounter. This defines the rhetoric and regard to which the subject is considered by the public. This narrative captures the erotic imagination and succeeds as a public image: the fair-skinned maiden encountering the chiseled, dark, hairy beast of a neanderthal. Thus, neanderthals are kept in their brutish quarters by the means with which we described them. Perhaps this is a purely a narrative that plays to our sexual imaginations. Or maybe it is an instantiation of fulfilling humanity's desire to tame the beast. Through sexual encounters, humans tamed the brutish race, overcoming them and displacing them, giving way for the eventual and destined rise of humanity. Regardless, through this narrative, the neanderthal remains the other, even if in fact we are the neanderthal.

Where the sun never sets...

Why can't there just be a disinterested interest in a place or time? The foundations of archaeology fall within the particular endeavor to pursue the origins of Western civilization, the zenith of mankind, whether it be from man the hunter to land of King David, or anytime or place in between, there is concurrently this interplay between the burgeoning field of archaeology from the 19th century and the  socio-cultural politics surrounding this condition. In the particular situation of archaeology in the 'Holy Land,' there is a concentrated effort based on the implicit interests pursued through excavation to further the presence of Western, Christian, Anglo-Saxon merits via tracing its origins.

Much of the earliest excavations took place under these conditions, whether it be in Palestine, Egypt, Turkey, etc. As Margarita Díaz-Andreu points out in A World History of Nineteenth-Century Archaeology: Nationalism, Colonialism, and the Past, the archaeological excursions in these regions were due to their links to the Bible and relation to the development of Western civilization. Ironically, in the strand of thought introduced by Edward Said, it appears that early archaeologists pursued the study of the other as an implicit study of us, i.e. the 'West.' To see what one is, one must see what he/she is not. Likewise, in the way of thinking that the West is at the pinnacle of humanity, seeking out the other, in the case of the biblical lands, is a means to seek our origins, albeit a teleological one. Origins imply a privileged outcome. Furthermore, a fascination and characterization with the other, is a form of exoticism that is more reflexive on the one who is defining that other. This mentality foregrounds the entire development of archaeology in the biblical archaeological narrative that Díaz-Andreu describes. For Egypt, it was the land of the other that was a predecessor to Rome, a main stepping stone of Western accolades: "...the attraction exerted by the Pharaohs' land was principally connected to its ties with the classical world--mainly the move of obelisks to Rome in the early centuries of the era--, the presence of spectacular remains like the pyramids and the romanticism of its association with the exotic" (137). It was to seek out those relations of Romans and Egyptians that inspired early archaeologists, as it was to pursue the biblical narrative elsewhere.

This plays out throughout the early archaeology of the region. Through exoticism as a means to preference the self and defining the rhetoric of archaeology in the holy land, archaeology developed as an extremely imperialist endeavor. These efforts, although in some way moved beyond by much of the archaeological community, has endeavored through political influence. Western perceived origins within the land was used to define political boundaries, and has continued to be prevalent in the national subconsciouses and the archaeology pursued under such mentalities.

Free trip to Bible Land!

Why do archaeology in Jerusalem? There are plenty of opportunities for tourism. It's the holy city, land of the Bible. David stepped there, Jesus here, Mohammed over there.

The difficulty with archaeology in the region of Palestine is that there are far too many biases as far as interests guided by explicitly biblical proofs. The dilemma of archaeology by such means is that it is pointed toward the releasing the burden of soil on top of sites that can be claimed as having a historical or biblical significance. But such endeavors do not enhance the understanding of humanity as a hole. It is teleological, inherently tied to political agendas of the contentious region by grounding stakes to the land through precedence that is sought to be proven archaeologically. As Ann Killebrew admits, "Whether we like it or not, archaeology of the twenty-first century through necessity (economically, ideologically, and intellectually) will be a more 'public' archaeology wherein we will need to confront all aspects related to the archaeological endeavor and its interface with many publics" (138).  Perhaps more so than most, archaeology within the region must contend with the varying and pressing interests of this land, and the pressures of developing an archaeology that is explicitly political.

It is for this reason that Raphael Greenberg insists the prevalence of local peoples in archaeology of the region. In such a way, there may be an attempt to save the archaeological integrity of the region for intellectual pursuits rather than those aimed at a political instantiation. The trouble with archaeology in Jerusalem is that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all hold a stake in the area. If archaeological pursuits were to be interested as a religious pursuit, as it has so inherently been in the past, then the myriad of other contexts are ignored and destroyed in the destructive process of archaeological excavation. Thus, Greenberg presents a list of considerations for archaeologists, akin to an ethical code of conduct for archaeologists, in order to devoid themselves of as much political bias as possible. Of course, such a desire is quite idealistic, though nevertheless imperative to be aware of in a self-reflexive archaeology that may have some intellectual poignancy instead of archaeology being a political handmaiden for the region.

The object of archaeology?

What does an archaeologist do? What, exactly, is it that one studies? More poignantly, why do we care? This is seemingly at the core of a self-reflective archaeology as alluded to by Ian Hodder in "Archaeological Theory in Contemporary European Societies; the Emergence of Competing Traditions" and Ann Brower Stahl's "Introduction: Changing Perspectives on Africa's Past."

Importantly, Hodder concludes that there is a certain level of objectivity whereby our understanding of the past in the present time is informed by the remains from the past: "...the experience of the archaeological data and the patterning observed in the past do more than resist our ideas; they help create them" (22). However, is this a satisfying response to his previous statement that "The past is undeniably social, as is the practice of archaeology" (20)? He seems to claim that there is indeed some middle ground between the objective presence of material remains from a past existence and the socially-affected discipline of archaeology. However, with considerations such as "...the history of theories used in archaeology cannot be separated from the concrete conditions of practical research or from the social functions of archaeology in society" (21), how in fact can this objective-subjective dichotomy be mediated? Hodder claims that "The continuities we claim with the past have in part been created by that past. Archaeological science involves a dialectical relationship between past and present. The hermeneutic circle is not a vicious one" (22). This seems to be a logical fallacy, however, if the continuities we claim to have with a given past are in fact up to an interpretation of that past. Where does the science come into archaeology? How is that dialectic any different than the discourse that Said discusses on the matter of Orientalism?

If the object of archaeology is a past that is uncovered and interpreted in the present, is not any continuity drawn between this present and that past merely a structure of rhetoric and interpretation? The process that Hodder seems to rectify as in some way objective is anything but. It is a reflexive discourse, as is Said's Orientalism. We are the present, they are the past. We observe and study them through our lens. As the speakers for the past, we describe it and analyze it. Where, exactly does the data come in? How is this any different than an Orientalist discourse?

To be fair to Hodder, he does acknowledge this to an extent by inscribing: "The attempt to embed material events within the whole framework of meaning in which they were once situated clearly involves the analyst in a double hermeneutic in which 'their' and 'our' understandings are gradually accommodated in a moving double circle. This process of double reading has to be critically aware" (18). Is this not a method of navigating the vicious hermeneutic circle that Hodder eventually rejects? Poignantly, the process of archaeology is, indeed, a moving, reflexive discourse. It seems that there is no mere moment of archaeological objectiveness, but more so an ongoing, reflexive, discursive, hermeneutic enterprise. Is this not the history that Hodder so sensitively describes of his account of European archaeology?

So, this does not give an answer to any question asked originally as to what and why archaeologists study. There is seemingly no object of archaeology. The only objective to be found here is that it is a discourse among as many interpreted evidences as possible, characterized as 'data,' and with that to define, redefine, and question a past that is interpreted in the present. Likewise, these are the sorts of systematic problems that Stahl faces in prefacing an account of African archaeology. She considers knowledge to be always interested; i.e., the object of an analysis is determined "... by the social, political, and economic contexts..." of the subject (2). The conclusions drawn from such analyses are presented as universal, objective conditions, or 'knowledge,' but really "...the universal emerges NOT from widely documented shared features, as we might at first imagine, but rather from the elevation of a shared instance or example to stand for the universal" (6).

As for a capacity for archaeologists to do some study of worth, as heretofore they have been perhaps unfairly treated in this reflection, they consider sources--or perhaps objects--of a past, some of which are privileged over others. The direct sources are those privileged over indirect ones, having been produced in the temporal realm of concern. These data points that Hodder perhaps designates too much of an objectivity for, are by no means such. However, their presence and usage in an archaeological endeavor is not to be unsubstantiated, but reconsidered. To reckon with these qualms, Stahl wisely places such archaeological 'data' in its rightful place by claiming, "Archaeological sources...provide valuable independent evidence against which to assess models of the past." The insistence here is on her use of the term models. To bring this discussion to a more hopeful end with regards to the place and function of archaeology, if we are to study 'the past' as models of such rather than an objective sort, and the evidence from which as artifacts to be questioned, analyzed, and interpreted for or against certain models, than in fact archaeology can have an exuberant worth insofar as it acquires and exploits data while questioning it and the meaning thereof.

With this in mind, Stahl puts it far better than I could attempt to here, and will therefore end as she does. Her considerations are universal, however. For archaeology to succeed and have relevancy, it must be a subjective study of the subjective. As one would advise the insecure and miserable pubescent boy, accept and pride in who you are. For archaeology to reach the level of adulthood, it must accept what it is and what it is not. It is an anarchical endeavor, no right or wrong, this or that, us or them. Archaeology is, indeed, the study of everything. It is only different insofar of its perspective. Thus, perhaps archaeology is more suited as a frame of mind than a discipline unto itself. Anyway, rather than belabor this point, Stahl has some words to comfort us all in the throes of archaeological existential crises:

"Africa's pasts speak to us--conceived as an encompassing 'circle of we'--not for what they tell us about teleologically conceived universal progress, or quintessential difference and diversity conceived as a departure from an ever-present phantom standard of 'us-ness.' Rather they offer insight into our humanness; to the struggles of humans as social actors to feed and care for family, to express commonalities and differences, to impose or resist power and hegemony, in short, to make our way in a world of entangled and changing natural and cultural circumstances" (16).