Interesting or Interested?

Ann Brower Stahl's discussion or African archaeology revolves around a central issue of why pursue archaeology in a particular region. There is a dominance of western research taking place in the African continent. Although Western researchers might portray themselves as merely having an innocent region in this place, Stahl presents an account of a more biased interest to further Western interests. Is archaeology conducted because it is simply interesting, or rather, is Western researchers produce a data set that is interested for a particular purpose?

This discussion revolves around the notion of epistemology. Considering Ian Hodder's discussions of the development of archaeology in Archaeological Theory in Europe, "As we have seen, European archaeology has long been dominated by ethnogenetic questions which required little theoretical discussions beyond the methodologies of culture-historical reconstruction" (9). Apparently, archaeology can be viewed as a rather teleological endeavor--not one in which there is a disinterested pursuit for increasing humanity's knowledge of its past, but a task of proving particular hypothesis for the substantiation of contemporary societal norms and standpoints. This is exactly why Stahl lingers on the question of "For whom is knowledge of Africa's pasts relevant?" (2). Archaeology as a process of gathering information is always theoretical insofar as the researcher has inherent biases of a contemporary standpoint.

Stemming from Edward Said's account of Orientalism as an us-and-them dialectic, Stahl similarly portrays African archaeology in a similar light. Archaeological research in Africa are inherently engaged in a similar rhetoric. In the search for 'us,' there might be an idea that excavating is a means to uncover our genetic 'Eve.' Beside this term in itself being an extraordinarily gendered one, there is implicitly always going to be strain of interest by way of using archaeological evidence to further a contemporary philosophic standpoint. Again, to quote Stahl, "...the universal emerges NOT from widely documented shared features, as we might at first imagine, but rather from the elevation of a specific instance or example to stand for the universal" (6). Perhaps this is at the core of archaeology's anxiety of being viewed as scientific, since science is incontestable, as is the Western mantra. If archaeology is viewed as scientific, then it too is incontestable, and thereby the results of the Western archaeological endeavor in Africa as portraying a teleology of humanity from savage to civilized is likewise incontestable. It is for this reason that Stahl insists on a self-conscious sort of archaeological research in one's biases are made explicit. If we can avoid an insistence on accuracy and make way for intellectual empathy, then perhaps archaeology can show itself as an apt field of its own, not as the little brother needlessly trying to live up to Science's example.

The Ideology of Archaeological Theory and Practice

“Ideology,” while a prevalent term in archaeological literature, is difficult to define precisely. In the first chapter of Ideology: An Introduction, “What is Ideology,” Terry Eagleton enumerates a variety of definitions, some of which are more neutral and others that either imply or assert value judgments. For instance, ideology is to certain scholars “the process of production of meanings, signs and values in social life,” while to others it is “systematically distorted communication.” (1-2). The first description is fairly neutral, while the second has clearly pejorative connotations.

Like Foucault, I am reluctant to reject the Marxist notion of ideology as inherently distorted or false because it implies the existence of its opposite: a universal, absolute truth. However, I do not believe that “ideology” as a concept necessitates rejection altogether. Rather, I tend towards the first definition, which can reflect the formation and propagation of any belief system, dominant or marginal, as all are neither “true” nor “false.” Additionally, in my view, ideologies are not teleological; rather, they are relational and evolve, converge and diverge. As Said emphasized in his discussion of Orientalism, ideologies are formed through dialectical interactions between individuals within society. Therefore, individuals do have the capacity to influence ideologies and even contradict them. Acknowledgement of this individual agency makes the continued dominance of certain ideologies that much more impressive and allows us to consider the reasons why they were so well suited to a particular spatiotemporal arena.

In thinking about the concept of ideology and how I might define such a problematic (but also, I would argue, useful) term, I began to think about the ideologies of archaeology itself, both as a theoretical discipline and a practical, applied endeavor. This passage from the first chapter of Archaeological Theory in Europe: The Last Three Decades emphasizes the ideological nature of archaeology:

Each age, in each country, writes its own history and its own archaeology. As a result of these changes and differences, and as a result of the engrained social and political uses and misuses of archaeology in the European context, it is difficult to remain blind to the theoretical construction of archaeological objects, difficult not to see archaeologists transforming reality and difficult not to recognize artefacts as products rather than records (Hodder, 10).

The shift in archaeological theory and practice from antiquarianism to post (or even perhaps post-post) processualism can arguably be discussed as a change in the dominant ideologies of the archaeologist. As Hodder emphasizes, the pasts we construct as archaeologists change from year to year, decade to decade, and century to century not because of radical shifts in the material culture that is excavated but by changes in the belief systems of the discipline’s practitioners. Post-processualism acknowledges the influence of the individual archaeologist’s sociopolitical history in his/her scholarship. It is standard practice today to concede that objectivity is an impossible and therefore futile goal. However, it is important to realize that this shift is not an escape from ideology altogether but rather the emergence of a new dominant paradigm within archaeology.

This recognition of the pervasiveness of ideology as an integral component of society is important with regards to the practical, cultural heritage applications of archaeology in addition to the theoretical. For example, in the first chapter of Ann Stahl’s book African Archaeology: A Critical Introduction, she briefly problematizes UNESCO World Heritage sites. According to the organization’s website, “What makes the concept of World Heritage exceptional is its universal application. World Heritage sites belong to all the peoples of the world, irrespective of the territory on which they are located.” While this sentiment is seemingly positive, it imposes an ideology of global allegiance to an organization that is predominantly “Western” in philosophy, personnel and funding. It is trendy in the United States educational system to produce “global citizens,” but in countries that face constant socioeconomic and political instability (largely as the result of a Western colonialist history), prioritizing a national or even local agenda may be more advantageous. Of course, I am thrilled that because of these organizations, tracts of biodiverse ecosystems and historical sites have been preserved. However, it is important to recognize that the idea that one organization can lay claim to the entire globe is a fundamentally Western ideology stemming from an expansionist, colonialist history.

Therefore, not only is ideology still relevant as a theoretical concept in archaeology, it has practical implications for the preservation (and therefore construction) of the past.  

How do we look for answers?

“The same site also contained deposits that are more than twice as old as the skull, including 46,000-year-old ostrich eggshells that were used to make beads. The new finds could reveal insights about the shifts in human culture that took place starting when the ancestors of present-day humans left Africa, around 50,000 years ago. [See Images of Our Closest Human Ancestor]”     [article referencing: “Late Pleistocene age and archaeological context for the hominin calvaria”, from GvJm-22 (Lukenya Hill, Kenya]  (Tryon et al. 2015, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences)

The above passage appeared in a news report about new discoveries in hominid diversity at the Lukenya Hill site in Kenya.  While most mainstream reporting of science-related news tends to reduce serious research to inexact sound bites (in this case: “Stone Age Skull Reveals Astonishing Human Diversity”), I was struck by the reappearance of that old “out of Africa” chestnut that Lucy mentioned last week. This notion that  the ancestors of present-day humans left Africa, suggests that Africa is now depopulated of present-day humans.   Hopefully someone remembered to turn out the lights.

However, even within more theoretical circles, migration is associated with progress in a linear way.    As Stahl points out, the narrative of change within “the Project of World Prehistory” is typically one that ends, or at least arrives, in the Northern Hemisphere [Stahl, 5, 7].  Africa is a place that we have left behind and perceive of in a disassociated way:  it’s what we once were, but now only vaguely recognize.  There is a tendency to apply a standardized model to what can be observed-- or imagined:  looking for material culture that will fit a particular template so that we might determine what is actually culture. 

Hodder (at least in this essay) ties post-processualist Archaeology to a European framework, arguing for an expansion beyond data collection and more inclusive or multi-faceted discourses [Hodder, 6-7].   He begins by contrasting the nationalist underpinnings of earlier Archaeology, which tended to assign primacy of innovation to one group or another (frequently, and not coincidentally, a region or ethnicity associated with the archaeologist, himself).  By opening up culture-theory to encompass a range of broad human traits and social constructions, Hodder would refresh the dialogue concerning origins and their reverberations still present in the culture.

But with that dominant focus on Europe and its social “innovations” or landmarks, it strikes me that Africa is still filtered through a European or Western perspective. The search of comparable cultural landmarks in prehistory continues to place Africa in a European framework.   Stahl cites the search for the origins of innovation, at least as defined in a Euro-centric way  (metallurgy and trade, for example), as a sign that there remain limited models at work when evaluating culture [Stahl, 12-13).  To be fair, Hodder’s assessment is nearly 25 years old (if not more).  While more generous and dynamic than what preceded it, I’m not sure it provides an unencumbered system with which to look at Africa and prehistory.

Archaeology: A Study of Failed Systems or a Failed System?

Something that Professor Boyd mentioned in class on Tuesday has stuck with me and driven me to consider archaeology in a new light. I had heard that "archaeology is the study of failed systems" before, but it had not really sunk in for me until Tuesday's class. In the past at least, archaeology truly has been the study of failed systems as that was essential to its practice: in order for archaeologists to study something, it must be under the ground and in order for it to be under the ground, something must have gone wrong. However, I do not think that this is entirely true. There are too many reasons for things to end up under the ground for every bit of evidence discovered below the topsoil to be considered as evidence of failure. Thinking along the same grain, the idea that archaeology can be used as kindling for nationalism and be the evidence of a failed system is paradoxical. Thus, I would make the argument that everything found under the ground is a foundation. Just as we walk on ground that came to be there naturally over time, so history creates the foundation of today's civilizations.

Using this as a metaphor, I approached the Hodder reading in a new light. I would add to his argument in support of archaeology by saying that it is natural for there to be such different approaches and techniques in archaeology as it is not a laboratory science. There is no such thing as a controlled environment in archaeology and each stroke of a trowel is a test that cannot be recreated. Thus, saying that the many approaches to archaeological research are "anti-science heresy" is utter crap (Hodder 19). Just as we would not approach the geological research of a cliff face with the same tools and techniques as that of a riverbed, so we should not expect archaeology to conform to a specific set of rules.

Archaeology can be defined as neither the study of failed systems or a failed system itself.

Revealing... Archaeology!

Reviewing the historical development of archaeology, as Bruce Trigger does in A History of Archaeological Thought, the exploitation of the past for the use by a present is apparent. The inhabitants of the Roman Empire and medieval Europe seemed to have little interest in defining an objective past to look back upon. As Trigger notes, Roman writers neglected to mention ruins often times, and medieval Europeans plundered them for new constructions (30-31). Most delving into a past had the purposes for ideological justification, arguably as it does in any period. However, in these earlier periods that past was used to justify the religiosity of those times. Objects of the past may have been used as offerings to the gods of polytheistic systems (30), or exploited as holy objects in the form of relics (35).

During the Renaissance, people similarly looked toward the past as an exploitative measure to emulate itself upon and improve on the former: "The aim of renaissance scholars was to understand and try to emulate as best they could the glorious achievements of antiquity.... Only in its possession of a religion based on divine revelation could the modern age be viewed as unambiguously superior to ancient times" (35-6). This primordial archaeology took the form of a particular view of the past on which to base and improve the present. This propaganda of sorts took the form of archaeological revelation--a carving out of a past to be structured and used by the present. This takes place almost literally so in the depiction of the early excavations at Herculaneum in which the ruins seem to be carved out of the dirt (37). Thus, in the revelation of archaeology as a western discipline, it took the form of a revelation of foreseen pasts, pasts structured in the present for the use and discrimination of present politics. 

This is not unlike the critiques made of Orientalism by Edward Said. He considers the field to be a political discourse of the present by controlling the discourse of an other, and thereby defining a widely held view of the other through this discourse. This power play is no different than what transpired in the early developments in archaeology, in which a discourse of a different other took place--that of the past the past. As Said describes, it is the definition of the other than determines the character of the subject. As archaeology begins to reveal a past by the eighteenth century, it is a past that very much is used to substantiate a present politics. In terms of revelation, not only is it through archaeology that the present subject reveals a past, but too does that interpreted past reveal the subject. Archaeology is every way as much about the present as it is about the past. 

These revelations are quite evident in the writing of V Gordon Childe on Racism and Marxism, in which he implicitly shows how archaeology is used as a tool to substantiate racial or marxist viewpoints. He uses archaeological research to discredit the racial archaeology and to support his marxist archaeology. Engaging with the us-and-them rhetoric, Childe displays a reversal of the western historical narrative in which is is the East transforming the Europeans ("Races, Peoples and Cultures in Prehistoric Europe," 203). In similarly using archaeology to bolster the poignancy of a marxist standpoint, he describes its ability to 'write prehistory' ("Prehistory and Marxism," 95). This logical paradox once again proves the point that archaeology is here being used as a tool to support a contemporary political standpoint. In doing so he marks the potential efforts that a Marxist archaeologist can make to write prehistory by means of gathering an assemblage of artifacts. This is nevertheless an act of the archaeologist revealing the past. Of course, the past does not reside behind a curtain that the archaeologist pulls back, but rather he does an act of re-presencing an other in the contemporary land of us. The revelation is a mere bridge connecting past and present, us and them, subject and object; but in an effort to reveal such an other, archaeology matter-of-factly reveals ourself instead. 

V. Gordon Childe: From Form to Functionalism

V. Gordon Childe, an Australian archaeologist working in the first half of the 20^th century, came at the tail end of a period in the development of archaeology referred to by Bruce Trigger in A History of Archaeological Thought as antiquarianism. Now possessing pejorative connotations, this term describes the classical and eventually prehistoric archaeological excavations from the Renaissance through the beginning of the 20^th century. While some of these antiquarians produced adequate documentation of their excavations and paid attention to stratigraphic levels, their process was largely deductive, and many were primarily concerned with obtaining decorative items for their private collections.

In his essay “Prehistory and Marxism” (1979), published posthumously in Antiquity, Childe derogatorily refers to his predecessors as “relicologists because they are generally so preoccupied with the forms of relics that they forget that the relics were made by men to satisfy some human need” (95). He goes on to distinguish himself from “a certain Nazi who devoted many pages to the classification of ‘axes’ by shape and section without ever asking himself what they were used for” (95). In my opinion, this distinction is one of Childe’s most important contributions to archaeological theory: rather than the antiquarian focus on stylistic differences (form), he attempts to infer the underlying function of archaeological artifacts.

Initially, Childe subscribed to the purely culture-historical approach espoused by, among others, German archaeologist and linguist Gustaf Kossinna. Childe utilized Kossinna’s concept of culture, which delimited groups of people according to material culture typologies. The nomenclature used by these theorists belies a preferencing of the artifacts themselves over the peoples who created them. For instance, another 19^th century German archaeologist, Friedrich Klopfleisch, named a European Neolithic group the Linearbandkeramik after a decorative technique of incising pottery with linear bands. Rather than using material culture as a lens through which to learn about past lifeways and ideologies, the proponents of cultural-historical archaeology viewed the artifacts as ends in of themselves. Like board game pieces, these stylized ceramics and stone tools were seen not as objects with a social history but as unambiguous proxies for demarcating the migration of, for example, the “Linear Band Ceramic Culture” across temporal and spatial scales.

However, with his exposure to Soviet archaeology and growing appreciation of Marxist theory, Childe grew critical of this purely correlative approach. As espoused in the above diatribe against so-called “relicologists,” he began to investigate not only how artifacts appear to us now, but also how they could have appeared to their creators. He calls the Marxist approach to archaeology “dialectical materialism,” which acknowledges the interplay between economy, environment, social organization, technology and ideology in shaping “culture” (Childe 1979). This interpretation of the term “culture” is dramatically different from his own definition, expressed in “Peoples and Cultures in Prehistoric Europe” two decades prior: “groups of distinctive traits, mostly peculiarities in material culture…[that] tend to hang together and be associated in a given continuous region at a given time” (1933).

Childe’s increasingly functionalist perspective is directly tied to his newfound characterization of “culture.” When culture was solely material, one could be an archaeologist and understand cultures simply by observing artifacts and their distributions. As culture became an increasingly complex product of both material and immaterial forces, however, acknowledging the function of artifacts became vital. After all, the immaterial factors at play (e.g. ideology, social hierarchy, political system, and even economy) cannot be excavated. Instead, through a series of inferences based on material objects in context it is possible to reconstruct some of the various components that interacted dialectically to comprise a particular culture. While structural functionalism is criticized for its determinism and lack of opportunity for individual agency, it was an innovative steppingstone, championed by Childe in his later writings, which transformed archaeology from an antiquarian treasure hunt to a methodological pursuit of knowledge. 

References:

Childe, V.G. 1933. "Races, Peoples and Cultures in Prehistoric Europe." History 71(18):193-203.

Childe, V. G. 1979. "Prehistory and Marxim." Antiquity 53(208):93-95.

Trigger, B. 1996. A History of Archaeological Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Childe's First Steps

This week's readings emphasized the role of archaeology in proving theory and how these theories come into play in the course of archaeological research. Childe especially came under the microscope as a particular example of how even the most sophisticated anthropological theories benefit from archaeology. The reading that encapsulates these ideas the most efficiently is undoubtedly "Prehistory and Marxism" by Childe himself. He articulates eloquently the common and not so common theories for the rise of civilization. In class, we talked quite enough about how archaeology played into this story, so I would like to instead focus on one anthropological theory in particular. His theories on how and why cooperation is possible put into words what other anthropologists I have read have circled around in entire books:

"It [cooperation] is always stimulated by symbols and beliefs that reinforce or entirely replace the supposedly innate urges to feed oneself and rear a family...And in general just one kind of ideology--institutions, beliefs, ideals--will keep that organization running most smoothly." 

My understanding of this statement is that in order for civilization (characterized by division of labour, specialization, technology and centralized authority) to occur, humans must have a reason to leave behind their initial instincts to serve only themselves and to reproduce. Childe argues that this reason is a unified ideology and I cannot help but agree with him. I know this to be true not from extensive research, but from current observations (something I think Childe would have smiled upon). My very life depends upon this being true as my father is a minister and makes a living caring for the religious life of our community. Without ideologies and religion, I would not have money for school and my parents would have had to spend their time only putting food on the table. My academic career rests on the idea that ideology allowed for civilization to form just as much as Childe's did.