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ARCH-THEORY  September 1998

ARCH-THEORY September 1998

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Subject:

Re: "Zen archaeology"

From:

Martin Byers <[log in to unmask]>

Reply-To:

[log in to unmask]

Date:

Fri, 25 Sep 1998 16:53:00 -0400

Content-Type:

text/plain

Parts/Attachments:

Parts/Attachments

text/plain (101 lines)



Juan A. Barcelo wrote:

> Maybe the point of discussion is the goal of archaeology. We deal with
> past remains, but is this really our goal? Are we interested in knowing
> people who lived in the Past?
>

I would not presume to speak for the "we" but I am sure that many
archaeologists are interested in the social and cultural structures
responsible for the patterning caused by prehistorical human populations.
Does this translate into "knowing people who lived in the Past?" No. It
translates into trying to know (reconstruct and empirically ground)  the
cultural rules, practices and social structures that were embodied in the
peoples of the Past and that were realized in their behaviours as these
generated the archaeological patterning..

> I'm sorry, but, although interesting, it is an impossible objective. We
> cannot understand why people acted in the past. Is then Archaeology an
> impossible science? Only if our only objective was knowing the past.
>

I respectfully disagree. If you are being categorical that "we cannot
understand why people acted in the past" then we certainly cannot understand
how our present was caused by that past activity since we cannot even say
what that activity was.

> It may seem ilogical, but the objective of archaeology, in my view, is
> the present. We should understand why our society is like it is, in
> other words, History is a kind of resoning, the way we reason
> temporally. It has to do with causality, because what we should analyze
> is the cause of ourselves as members of a society.
>

I do not find any illogical here. Archaeology - as an human science - is
motivated by the present and our wish to understand who we are, in this case
by how we (in the collective sense) got to be the way we are. You are
exploiting the ambiguity of words such as History. History refers to a
subject; a discipline, but it also refers to the tmeporal objects of that
discipline - past social structures, etc., as they were realized in the
patterning of  past behaviours. By raising the issue of causality, then you
are committed to archaeology as reconstruction of past life ways and social
structures since these are the causal forces that generated what we are
today.

> Archaeology is a way of looking at ourselves and analysing why we are
> like we are. We need data about the past, that is, how was our society
> before the present. But, the goal is not to know the past in its own
> terms, but as a means to know what has changed during the last 1000,
> 5000, 10000, 1000000 years.
>

I am sympathetic with Juan Barcelo's views about the motives for archaeology
- to understand ourselves today - but I disagree with the claim that we can
use the material residue of the past to achieve this without interpreting
this residue at least partly in terms that might be understandable to the
responsible agents, i.e., those humans, socially and culturally motivated,
that produced these residues.

> Archaeology is the science of the diacronic, and a comparative science:
> we are constantly comparing th past and the present. It is impossible a
> totally sincronic description, but we can study how settlement patterns
> have changed, how the subsistance resources changed, the effects of
> ritual on social organization. And we do not need to reconstruct ritual
> in order to know the relationship between non-economic bahaviour and
> social order.
>

Again, I cannot fully agree, particularly with the last claim. How can we
rationally separate ritual from social organization? Non-economic behaviour,
such as ritual, is often the motive for economic behaviour, and social
organization is the context in which it is permitted to occur. We can only
understand why economic behaviour occurs by knowing the ritual, the beliefs
and the social organization that this economic behaviour served to realize
and (possibly) satisfy. This does not mean that we have to reconstruct the
phenomenology of past subjects and "enter into their heads" so as to have
the same experiences that they had, but we do have to know what were the
phenomenological and social forces that drove this behaviour and made its
occurrence possible.

> Archaeology is also the science of garbage. We study the material
> effects of some social behavior. We do not need all information of a
> society, in the same way that an astronome can "see" a black hole
> without seeing it.

I do not see that what Juan Barcelo said above contradicts the spirit of my
comments. I can fully agree here. Even in the present we make sense of our
world by means of interpreting what we can see in terms of we cannot "see."
We can never "see" the social structures or the belief structures that
motivate and constrain and enable the observable behaviours we do see.
Archaeology is not unique in that way, i.e., in fact it works by
interpreting the visibles in plausible terms of the possible invisibles. Of
course, it is different in that we have so little of the visible left to
interpret. That makes it unique - but this is the challenge, surely.




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