Lecture Notes Week Six

Is The New Archaeology radically discontinuous with traditional archaeology and thus represents a Kuhnian revolution?

Or, is it a narrow methodological shift leaving core conceptual commitments in tact

Does it retain the core of traditional archaeology: that takes the archaeological record as a special case of anthropological phenomena: the study of distinctively cultural material to discover the underlying ethnological reality

Without change in fundamental metaphysics, no Kuhnian like revolution

Accd’g to new archaeologists, there was a fundamental shift

Away from a normative stance that took human ideas and norms as guiding behavior to a materialist ecosystem theory, accd’t to which aspects of material culture are to be studied as the “extrasomatic means of adaptation of human organisms”

    Model of identifying problems, hypotheses, and testing them

    Also represents a break with trying to reconstruct past human psychology

    Taking cultural processes as determinants, with underlying generalizations and regularities

Origins of the new archaeology as early as the 1950s?

“rejection of empiricism”: rejection of archaeology as fact gathering advocated by some as early as post WW 1.

Were the problems with traditional archaeology a function of a deficiency in archaeological methods or the physical fields (uneven and sparse data)?

Debate between a commitment to avoid speculation at all costs v. something more than “the mere finding of things” needed if archaeology is to be a science

By the 1930s and 40s “how” and “why” questions began to emerge but contemporaneous reviews indicate archaeology still largely antiquarian

Still gathering facts, although trying to systematize them but without clearly identified problems or efforts to reconstruct the significance of the data collected.

Tensions between a commitment to scientific rigor and ambitions to reconstruct an ethnographically rich account of the cultural past

One way to resolve it: continue the focus on fact gathering and systematizing the data, with theoretical concerns put off for the future

Radical critics in the same period:

    Fact gathering to be subsumed under and directed by an explicitly theoretical orientation

    An integrationist (v. sequent stage) model

    Mere fact gathering as intellectually irresponsible

    Fact gathering itself is inherently selective; leaving it at the level of the haphazard is particularly unscientific

    Can only proceed scientifically when informed by reference to the purposes of the artifacts, which means identifying research objectives

    Even a body of factual information cannot be established without theoretical presuppositions about its significance

    What constitutes “a fact” is determined by a problem at hand

Continuities between the "new" archaeology of the 1960s and 70s and critiques of traditional archaeology offered in the 30s and 40s

Realism vs. social constructivism in phil of archaeology

Typology: constructivists and realists in archaeology

Multiple senses of “constructivist”

1.    Typologies and taxonomies are constructs because we cannot assume that the archaeological record has “natural joints” that will determine how it should be carved up (some are instrumentalists; all appeal to contextualist arguments)

2.    Choices of typologies are determined by social conventions and thoroughly “socially constructed”

McKerns’s “Midwest Taxonomic System”

    Positivist/empiricist

    Sequence model

    Taxonomies as provisional and arbitrary for that reason, but not social constructs

    His taxonomic model is “timeless” and “spaceless”

Critiques:

    Any taxonomy builds on theoretical presuppositions; if these go unrecognized, the taxonomy really is arbitrary

    Inattention to temporal and spatial locations and relationships will not yield historical knowledge

    Taxonomies are (merely) tools or instruments

    Lack of account by McKern of how he determined the classifications that rendered some artifacts as “cultural determined”

    His background assumptions include a heavy normative/cultural orientation 

Level Definitions
•    Pattern - A taxonomic level that is made up of similar phases. Similar patterns are grouped into a base or a period.
•    Phase - A taxonomic level that is made up of similar aspects. Similar phases are grouped into a pattern.
•    Aspect - A taxonomic level that is made up of similar foci. Similar aspects are grouped into a phase.
•    Focus - A taxonomic level that is made up of multiple components that contain similar artifacts. Similar foci are grouped into an aspect.