Chap 2 Bintliff Pp 7-22

16
8/3/2019 Chap 2 Bintliff Pp 7-22 http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/chap-2-bintliff-pp-7-22 1/16 2 The death of archaeological theory?  John Bintli In a amous essay (Te Death o the Author 1967, reprinted 1977) the literary critic Roland Barthes questioned whether the existence o an author gets in our way in a critical encounter with a literary text. In the same way it is reasonable to ask whether Archaeology would benet rom discounting the burden o dogmatic theory and ideology (. rigger 2006) which has inexorably begun to obscure our pathways to reconstruct the past over the last 25 years. Should we ask ourselves i ‘Te Death o the Archaeological Teorist’ is a liberating thought experiment? My thinking about ideas in Archaeology was rst stimulated when I was still at school, by Glyn Daniel’s television series broadcast on the BBC in the 1960s, where he set out the development o the discipline since the early Antiquarians, ollowed by a more avant-garde series eaturing novel ideas rom Colin Renrew and Eric Higgs. As a BA student I was in many ways ortunate to be on the cusp o New  Archaeology’s emergence, being taught by what later would be termed ‘Culture Historians’ and the advocates o Processualism, whilst my early teaching years enorced engagement with the rising tide o British Post- processualism. Tis procession already alerted me to thinking about the reality o Tomas Kuhn’s Paradigm Teory, except that the speed o  Archaeological Teory’s shits o approach in his terms would mark a very immature discipline with sequent mini-paradigms. I also wanted to nd out about the sources o the ideas which entered our discipline, and to that end developed a course as much or my own benet as that o my students – ‘Archaeology and wentieth Century Tought’, which was a

Transcript of Chap 2 Bintliff Pp 7-22

Page 1: Chap 2 Bintliff Pp 7-22

8/3/2019 Chap 2 Bintliff Pp 7-22

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/chap-2-bintliff-pp-7-22 1/16

2

The death of archaeological theory?

 John Bintli  

In a amous essay (Te Death o the Author  1967, reprinted 1977) theliterary critic Roland Barthes questioned whether the existence o anauthor gets in our way in a critical encounter with a literary text. Inthe same way it is reasonable to ask whether Archaeology would benetrom discounting the burden o dogmatic theory and ideology (c . rigger

2006) which has inexorably begun to obscure our pathways to reconstructthe past over the last 25 years. Should we ask ourselves i ‘Te Death o the Archaeological Teorist’ is a liberating thought experiment?

My thinking about ideas in Archaeology was rst stimulated whenI was still at school, by Glyn Daniel’s television series broadcast on theBBC in the 1960s, where he set out the development o the disciplinesince the early Antiquarians, ollowed by a more avant-garde  series

eaturing novel ideas rom Colin Renrew and Eric Higgs. As a BA student I was in many ways ortunate to be on the cusp o New 

 Archaeology’s emergence, being taught by what later would be termed‘Culture Historians’ and the advocates o Processualism, whilst my early teaching years enorced engagement with the rising tide o British Post-processualism. Tis procession already alerted me to thinking about thereality o Tomas Kuhn’s Paradigm Teory, except that the speed o 

 Archaeological Teory’s shits o approach in his terms would mark avery immature discipline with sequent mini-paradigms. I also wanted tond out about the sources o the ideas which entered our discipline, andto that end developed a course as much or my own benet as that o my students – ‘Archaeology and wentieth Century Tought’, which was a

Page 2: Chap 2 Bintliff Pp 7-22

8/3/2019 Chap 2 Bintliff Pp 7-22

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/chap-2-bintliff-pp-7-22 2/16

8 Te Death o Archaeological Teory 

very illuminating voyage out o our discipline or all o us. I gradually became sceptical about the ‘use and discard’ approach archaeologicaltheorists were developing, not least because I was already aware that

there remained much to inspire and stimulate rom works written in allthe major ‘traditions’: Gordon Childe’s work rom the 1930s to 1950s,or example, was a constant source o ideas or Andrew Sherratt and isstill or some o my research today.

Yet o course, all disciplines hopeully progress over time in theirrigour and range o tools (McNeill 1986), and nobody can deny that both New and Post-processual archaeologies have added to the

intellectual armaments o earlier theorists o our subject. On the otherhand, it is my personal belie, though I know it is shared by many colleagues, that each tradition has also taken much away rom earlierrichness o ideas and approaches to the Past. Exploring the developmento Archaeology in other countries, or example or me, Germany orFrance, has revealed whole areas o innovative scholarship which remainlargely unknown within the largely Anglophone Teory raternity o 

Britain and America.My especial target in this deliberately provocative short essay has beenthe overwhelmingly-negative eect o Ideological Conormity that hasarisen within Archaeological Teory. Te most debilitating result o whatI have earlier called the New Scholasticism (Bintli 1991a), has beenthe emasculation o independent, critical thinking amongst studentsand young researchers within the discipline. By constantly changingthe goalposts, the list o required sacred texts, theory teachers have ledyoung scholars to eel intellectually inadequate, since hardly have they scoured the pages o Lévi-Strauss so as to parrot Structuralism, thenthey are told this is dropped in avour o Giddens’ Agency theory, andso on. Keeping up with cultural ashion, rather than bringing studentsto sel-evaluation o intellectual approaches, places power in the handso teachers. We have ound an increasing trend in classes, or studentsto repeat pages o leading theory texts as actual accounts o the world,

making them less and less able to nd their own critical voices. I onechallenges students or young researchers to justiy why a particularconcept or approach has been taken, it is generally the case that theanswer is merely that ‘a leading authority wrote this’. Citation o sacredtexts becomes more and more the only authority needed to prove a

Page 3: Chap 2 Bintliff Pp 7-22

8/3/2019 Chap 2 Bintliff Pp 7-22

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/chap-2-bintliff-pp-7-22 3/16

Te death o archaeological theory?  9

case-study, rather than the matching o several alternative models tothe data. Published papers increasingly begin with pages o scholasticcitation to works o theory, ollowed by applications to archaeological

data which rely more on repeated reerence to the avoured approachthan providing convincing matching o concepts to recovered materialevidence. esting more than one reading o the data is almost neverconceived o as necessary or desirable.

My viewpoint has been honed through a long series o publishedstudies, beginning with my rst Teory paper in 1979. Tis presentarticle thus represents a long reection looking back over my collected

experiences o Archaeological Teory, and briey touches on many topics already published in these book-chapters and papers in moredetail than our allotted space here permits.

What, to begin with, do we mean by ‘Teory’ anyway? ‘Teory’,according to the Chambers Dictionary, comes rom the Greek, theoreeein ‘to be a spectator, to view’, and is variously dened as: ‘An explanation orsystem o anything; an exposition o the abstract principles o a science

or art; speculation as opposed to practice’. Particularly i we took thelast interpretation, it could apply to the ideas o Van Däniken. So I shallchoose here as a proessional in the discipline o Archaeology to ocusinstead on ‘the principles o a science or art’.

Te New Archaeology ormally opened an elaborate discussion on theneed to set out a critique o the principles o Archaeology, and or oneo its ounders, David Clarke, they were to be those o Science. Herehe states exactly this aim (rom  Analytical Archaeology [1968] 1978: xv):

‘Archaeology is an undisciplined empirical discipline. A disciplinelacking a scheme o systematic and ordered study based upondeclared and clearly dened models and rules o procedure. Iturther lacks a body o central theory capable o synthesizingthe general regularities within its data in such a way that theunique residuals distinguishing each particular case might bequickly isolated and easily assessed’.

Note here that he allows or interplay between the general and theparticular.

And more rom his pioneer ([1968] 1978) work,  Analytical  Archaeology :

Page 4: Chap 2 Bintliff Pp 7-22

8/3/2019 Chap 2 Bintliff Pp 7-22

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/chap-2-bintliff-pp-7-22 4/16

10 Te Death o Archaeological Teory 

‘Above all else, this book is a temporary and tentative assessmento a complex theoretical development that must inevitably take one or two more generations to mature as a reasonably 

comprehensive and airly viable set o disciplined procedure’(Clarke 1978, xvi)‘It ollows that since one may selectively trace an innity o particular networks through sociocultural systems and theirossil remains, no single approach can have the sole prerogativeo accuracy and inormative utility. Consequently, there are asmany competing opinions about the proper orientation anddimensions o archaeological analysis as there are archaeologists

– thus even the domain o archaeology is partitioned into theoverlapping elds o vigorous rival archaeologies … Nevertheless,there is one critical subsystem within archaeological studies which…may claim droit de seigneur in the whole domain – andthat is archaeological central theory …’ (Clarke 1978, xvii).

‘the aims o archaeologists vary [thus] … these diering aims… will give varying direction and potential to the analysis o 

archaeological data and may account or diering views o thesame “acts”, without necessarily invoking error on the part o any party … [Tis] is a strength … in that no single view … o aset o data can ever be wholly comprehensive or “true”. Indeed weshould encourage the analysis o archaeological problems romas many dierently based approaches as possible and integratetheir overall consensus’ (Clarke 1978, 19).

Let us emphasise his view that generations would be needed to getTeory right as a practice, and urthermore his support or diverseapproaches o equal explanatory potential … but  the core o Teory is this:

‘we may understand archaeology as having three interrelatedspheres o activity … Te sphere concentrating on data recovery – principally excavation, the sphere engaged in systematicdescription – taxonomy and classication, and nally theintegrating, synthesizing study generating models, hypothesesand theories … By the continuous eedback cycle o observation,hypothesis, experiment and idealized model, the models …become more accurately adapted to the pattern o the observeddata’ (Clarke 1978, 12-13).

Page 5: Chap 2 Bintliff Pp 7-22

8/3/2019 Chap 2 Bintliff Pp 7-22

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/chap-2-bintliff-pp-7-22 5/16

Te death o archaeological theory?  11

Here is Clarke’s central process or theoretical analysis: models arecompared and contrasted with the changing evidence in a cycle, tosharpen and support those with the closest t to the data (Fig. 2.1). But

Fig. 2.1. David Clarke’s model or the processing o archaeological data. Source:Clarke 1968, fg. 2.

Page 6: Chap 2 Bintliff Pp 7-22

8/3/2019 Chap 2 Bintliff Pp 7-22

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/chap-2-bintliff-pp-7-22 6/16

12 Te Death o Archaeological Teory 

there is or us now, a curiosity in that diagram and urther descriptionlater in his 1968 text, o this ‘systems’ ow o procedures: the ultimateanalytical tool is to make mathematical models o the past. Here Clarke

goes well beyond mere scientic method into a totally unwarranted,personal belie that human aairs are reducible to Einstein-like ormulaeamenable to signicance tests. I have no doubt that had he lived beyondhis short lie this would have been dropped through greater experience

  with archaeological materials, but it is the rst instance o a latertendency to substitute personal belie or models.

Let us turn to my next theoretical guru – Lewis Binord. (Here

quoting rom his pathnding essay ‘Archaeological Perspectives’ outo the New Perspectives in Archaeology volume (1968), reprinted in  An

 Archaeological Perspective , 1972):

‘the decisions as to which characteristics are signicant in thegeneral development o culture do not derive rom the datathemselves; they are given meaning by the ideas we hold aboutthe processes o cultural development. I we simply employ 

these ideas or interpreting archaeological remains, then no new inormation can be gained rom the archaeological record aboutprocesses which operated in the past’ (Binord 1972, 89).

‘he position being taken here is that dierent kinds o phenomena are never remote; they are either accessible or they are not. “Nonmaterial” aspects o culture are accessible in directmeasure with the testability o propositions being advancedabout them. Propositions regarding any realm o culture– technology, social organization, psychology, philosophy, etc.– or which arguments o relevance and empirically testablehypotheses can be oered …’ (Binord 1972, 95).

Here Binord warns us that a model or viewpoint in itsel does not add toour understanding o the Past, only the testability o our interpretationsensure that we gain new ‘knowledge’. Yet once again, the intrusion o 

a personal belie – the ‘worm in the bud’ appears rom the beginningtoo with Binord (1972: 100):

‘In our search or explanations o dierences and similarities inthe archaeological record, our ultimate goal is the ormulationo laws o cultural dynamics’.

Page 7: Chap 2 Bintliff Pp 7-22

8/3/2019 Chap 2 Bintliff Pp 7-22

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/chap-2-bintliff-pp-7-22 7/16

Te death o archaeological theory?  13

 Where did this idea o the ‘Laws’ o culture come rom? It is actually agrand philosophical proposition, buzzing around intuitively in Binord’shead in a similar vein to Clarke’s personal obsession with reducing the

 world to mathematical ormulae. Binord is o course still with us, andnot surprisingly he and other New Archaeologists soon abandoned thisbelie and shited their attention to testing more limited models through

 what came to be known as Middle Range Teory.And now on to the ounder o Post-processual Archaeology, Ian

Hodder (quoting rom Te Archaeological Process , 1999):

‘We need to break down the boundaries around the site. Tis ispartly a matter o opening the site to a wider range o visitorsand encouraging interactivity and multivocality … It is possibleor new Web sites to be built which act as alternatives to “ofcial”sites. For example, there are numerous (Web) sites at whichyou can nd out about the (archaeological) site at Çatalhöyük.In a way, the one place that Çatalhöyük isn’t is at Çatalhöyük.By this I mean that people construct their own versions o Çatalhöyük. Tey may do this on a Web site or in some othermedium, or even just in their minds and imaginations’ (Hodder1999, 196).

‘I the archaeological process is opened up to interactivity andmultivocality, i the boundaries around the discipline, site, teamand author are broken down, then it cannot any longer beadequate to separate an objective past dened by archaeologistsand a subjective past dened by non-archaeologists. We all

interpret the past rom dierent perspectives …’ (Hodder 1999,200).

On the ace o it, this seems a very dierent vision o the ArchaeologicalProcess, endless personal Pasts appear. Yet as we have now seen, DavidClarke also said this, as did Binord in other texts. But at the conclusiono these passages o seeming total relativism back comes something very dierent:

‘We all interpret the past rom dierent perspectives and thesedierent interpretations can be evaluated in relation to evidence… archaeological evidence has an “objective” materiality whichlimits and conronts what can be said about it …’ (Hodder1999, 200)

Page 8: Chap 2 Bintliff Pp 7-22

8/3/2019 Chap 2 Bintliff Pp 7-22

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/chap-2-bintliff-pp-7-22 8/16

14 Te Death o Archaeological Teory 

Now this sounds very amiliar rom our review o New Archaeology, butthe dierence here is that Hodder never states how, without a reversionto accepting a hard Scientic Method, dierent Pasts are actually to be

tested: in practice he preaches a disintegration o Clarke and Binord’sdiscipline with their ultimate gold standard o challenging a range o models to best t the data available at any one time. Te closest hegets is through the ‘hermeneutic circle’, yet as its terms suggest, the

 weakness o ‘circularity’ ounded on non-empirical insights and empathy deprive such an approach o rigour or condence in discounting otherapproaches.

Next to Mathew Johnson, whose (1999) textbook –  Archaeological Teory. An Introduction – is a basic inuence on the minds o thecurrent generation o Archaeology students (quoting here however romhis chapter ‘Archaeology and Social Teory’ in my 2004 volume Te Blackwell Companion to Archaeology ):

‘Data do not stand, pristine, prior to theory; we cannot thereore

index or measure the eect o theory on our interpretations o “the data” in a readily quantiable way… Teory, then, does notlead to new insights in a cause-and-eect way, but it does act asa description o what is going on …’ (Johnson 2004, 105).

I see this as more slippage rom any idea o ‘Systematic Analysis’ asdemanded by Clarke or Binord – there seems to be no clear view onhow ideas or models increase our knowledge o the Past.

And in more detail:‘theory…enables us to take the insights o one discipline andtranslate them into another. It enables us to show...how wemight translate or modiy them to reect our own concerns’(Johnson 2004, 106)

Teory seems to be getting avoured models rom somewhere else tosuit ‘our concerns’, which appears to mean that we actively select and

then transorm them to our own a priori ideas.

‘For some, the loss o determinacy in social theory is proo o theirrelevance o recent trends … O course there is no postmoderntheory o state origins …“the postmodern condition” is onein which the intellectual underpinnings o any cross-cultural

Page 9: Chap 2 Bintliff Pp 7-22

8/3/2019 Chap 2 Bintliff Pp 7-22

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/chap-2-bintliff-pp-7-22 9/16

Te death o archaeological theory?  15

delineation o a process like “state origins” (or o “chiedoms”or “agriculture”) have been argued to be atally awed’ (Johnson2004, 106).

Tus never try and compare the origins, or example, o the Egyptianand Mesopotamian states (why not?). Te writer assumes we areuncritical enough to allow intellectual doors to be shut in our ace, itseems. We have entered the world o highly-prescriptive control o what

 we should think.On to Chris illey, using as a testbed his 1994 book  A Phenomenology 

o Landscape Places, Paths and Monuments . Yet urther slippage (see

his table, reproduced as Fig. 2.2) rom an analytical process o many competing models tested against an ever-enlarging body o evidence: the

 World o the Past must be looked at like this . Here a dierent sort o law-like statement, which we could sum up as – ‘all pre-Modern people

 were…sensuous, sacred, ritual people in their essence’.

‘Te aim is to underline the aective, emotional and symbolicsignicance o the landscape’ (illey 1994, 35).

innitely open different densities

desanctied sanctied

control sensuousness

surveillance/partitioning ritualized/anthropomorphic

economic cosmological

‘useful’ to act ‘useful’ to think 

architectural forms resemble architecture an embodiment

each other in ‘disciplinary’ space of myth and cosmology

landscape as backdrop to action landscape as sedimented ritual

form

time linear and divorced from space time constitutive of rhythms

of social action in space-timeCAPITALIST/WESTERN SPACE PRE-CAPITALIST/NON-

WESTERN SPACE

Fig. 2.2. illey’s global contrast between the mental world o Modern and pre- Modern societies. Source: illey 1994, 20–21.

Page 10: Chap 2 Bintliff Pp 7-22

8/3/2019 Chap 2 Bintliff Pp 7-22

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/chap-2-bintliff-pp-7-22 10/16

16 Te Death o Archaeological Teory 

‘what is clear...is the symbolic, ancestral and temporal signicanceo the landscape. Writing about an economic “base” in relationto resource utilization or landscape use seems quite irrelevant

here’ (illey 1994, 67).

 As or many models and viewpoints vying to prove their t to the data: we are completely dislocated rom any such aim. Note the dismissive‘economy is irrelevant’.

And now to a nal act o slippage: Kristian Kristiansen, ‘Genes versusagents’, rom Archaeological Dialogues 2004, g. 2 (Fig. 2.3).

Faced with Stephen Shennan’s (2002) proposal that Darwinism can

play a role in assisting us to comprehend human actions in the Past,Kristiansen responds with this diagram to make clear to us how Culturehas displaced Biology in human development over time. What is theactual basis or this diagram? None at all, this is nothing more than anartistic impression o his bare personal philosophy, masquerading as a‘chart’, as i this were based on any kind o data. Here we have come tothe nadir o ‘Teory’ i we stay with Clarke’s ormulation o a rigorous

comparison and contrast o multiple models and approaches compared with the properties o the evidence…

All this sequence, rom Hodder onwards, is not the story any moreo ‘Teory’ in these terms. I preer to say ‘Teory has Died’ – this isIdeology and these scholars are Ideopraxists :

Fig. 2.3. Kristiansen’s (2004) diagram displaying the decline over time o biological actors and their displacement by the cultural in human evolution.Source: Kristiansen 2004, fg. 2.

Page 11: Chap 2 Bintliff Pp 7-22

8/3/2019 Chap 2 Bintliff Pp 7-22

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/chap-2-bintliff-pp-7-22 11/16

Te death o archaeological theory?  17

− Ideology rom Greek: idea idea and logos discourse;− Ideologist – one occupied with ideas or an idea;− Ideopraxist – one who is impelled to carry out an idea.

(Chambers’ wentieth Century Dictionary ).

By this I mean that a central divergence occurred in the grand  Archaeological Teory Project, between deploying concepts to testas structures or archaeological observations, and the insistence thatstructures attractive to the researcher or other reasons should be taken asthe undisputed basis or organising those data into meaningul patterns.

 And yet I would be the rst to admit that the seeds o this undoing o the Project o Teory were present in those higher claims o Clarke andBinord to explain the World through ormulae or scientic laws.

Can we rescue Clarke’s overall Project? In 1982 theoretical Geographers were able to elaborate beyond Clarke’s basic vision, through this diagram(Fig. 2.4), which appears to incorporate Modernism, Post-modernism

Fig. 2.4. A model by geographers suggesting a series o complementary approaches available or their discipline. Source: Harrison & Livingstone 1982, fg. 1.4.

Page 12: Chap 2 Bintliff Pp 7-22

8/3/2019 Chap 2 Bintliff Pp 7-22

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/chap-2-bintliff-pp-7-22 12/16

18 Te Death o Archaeological Teory 

and Darwinism, and much else, making clear that a healthy coreTeory should combine insights and models rom seemingly contrastedintellectual and methodological positions.

I have previously argued or a similar, Wittgensteinian ‘toolbox’methology – deploying several, equally-valid approaches to probethe complex structure o past lie, rather than through one preerredideological package (see also Mark Pearce’s paper in this collection onthe non-problem o incommensurability). Wittgenstein (Bintli 2000)suggested that human society lives through a series o orms o behaviourand kinds o discourse which are unique and not cross-translatable.

Te texture o human lie is woven rom their complex intermeshingin historic scenarios. As historians-archaeologists we can only rescuethe complexity o that Past through an equally multi-acetted set o approaches, which at times are each taken (incorrectly) as in themselvesalmost sufcient or that task (Fig. 2.5).

Reliance on a personal dogma, on an a priori claim that ‘the world works like this’, surely impoverishes the researcher’s ability to discover

how the Past was created, since alternative approaches or insights arerom the rst ruled out o the investigation. I rankly coness that Ido not know what happened in the Past when I start a new regionalproject: I might in the end propose explanations similar to what othershad suspected beore, or something none o us had imagined. When

MAJOR ARCHAEOLOGICAL DISCOURSES

CULTURALIST DISCOURSE

POLITICAL DISCOURSE

FUNCTIONALIST DISCOURSE

SCIENCE DISCOURSE

BIOLOGICAL DISCOURSE

RELIGIOUS DISCOURSE

Fig. 2.5. A complementary set o approaches or Archaeological interpretation,based on Wittgenstein’s oolbox concept. Source: Bintli 2008, fg. 10.2.

Page 13: Chap 2 Bintliff Pp 7-22

8/3/2019 Chap 2 Bintliff Pp 7-22

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/chap-2-bintliff-pp-7-22 13/16

Te death o archaeological theory?  19

I read the (usually lengthy) introductory chapters to studies heavy inTeory, what strikes me is that the analytical apparatus being set outis not based on empirical studies or experimental evidence, but on the

author’s philosophical or political preerences. Once the desired ‘wayso seeing the world’ are set out, the remainder o the study is concernedto decorate these models with suitable archaeological data. Since inreality we cannot claim such sure knowledge o the Past, it is morethan desirable to bring to its remains a range o approaches, and ndall the means possible to compare their possible role in explanations o our data. Stressing this inclusive and complex methodology rather than

the one-dimensional limitations o personalised dogmas has led someo us to explore the broad spectrum deployed by the French  Annaliste  historians (Fig. 2.6), where all conceivable acets o human history areruitully reconciled in a single holistic approach:

Fig. 2.6. Braudel’s model o history, where processes operating at dierent timescales interact to create unique historical sequences. Source: Bintli 1991b, fg. 1.2.

Page 14: Chap 2 Bintliff Pp 7-22

8/3/2019 Chap 2 Bintliff Pp 7-22

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/chap-2-bintliff-pp-7-22 14/16

20 Te Death o Archaeological Teory 

Te wide-ranging eclecticism o the Annaliste historians nds equalnecessity in probing individual human Agency as in the pressureso physical geography over millennia, in materialism as in art and

mentalities, allowing or example Darwinists, Marxists, Descartianindividualists, object or text ocussed researchers all to nd theirapproach incorporated, yet into a grander more exible scheme o historical analysis (c . Bintli 2004a).

But let us not lose sight o the crucial warning o Clarke and Binord:rst bring in a broad range o explanatory models – but the heart o theirTeory Machine lies in the next, essential stage – the skillul comparison

o each with the properties o the archaeological data.In trying to sharpen my comprehension o our encounter with

the evidence, I have ound (Bintli 2004b) the early 20th century debate between the great Physicists Max Planck and Ernst Mach very enlightening – Grand Teory versus Scientifc Empirical Discovery  (seeSteve Fuller 2000). For Planck, an elite o very brainy ideas-peopleset tasks or practical researchers and then told them what they had

ound, whilst or Mach the best science was democratic and arose romthe physical skill and high cratsmanship o experimenters ndingpractical patterning in real-world, hands-on encounters with matter.Mach reerred to Psychophysics – the reinorcing pleasure we get rommanipulation and probing o the physical world. E.O. Wilson (1984)and John Barrow (1995) explain human pleasure in Landscape with their

 Agrophilia and Biophilia hypotheses. Human beings receive chemicalgratication which makes us eel good when we do things that havebecome inbuilt survival skills. We developed or millions o years asexpert oragers in open landscapes and we hence needed to note andexplore the changing properties o the natural environment essential orobtaining ood and avoiding dangers.

I would like to ree Archaeologists rom ‘Ideopraxists’, or those whopreach that a (any?) single approach or model is right to the exclusiono all others, who tell them what to think, and what not to think. Better

surely to ll your brains with all the possible models and methodsor your research case-study, then search or the t between idea andpatterns in past material culture in a more intuitive way; next lay outthe way things now appear to make sense, but explicitly, as Clarkedemanded. I preer this way round, because research into our brain

Page 15: Chap 2 Bintliff Pp 7-22

8/3/2019 Chap 2 Bintliff Pp 7-22

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/chap-2-bintliff-pp-7-22 15/16

Te death o archaeological theory?  21

structure indicates that our non-conscious intelligence is a good dealsmarter than our conscious intelligence. Once that smart internal mindbrings out suggestive ts o ideas to evidence, then comes the time to

make a conscious elaboration o the case or a preerred explanation,preerably with many dierent actors involved.

References

Barrow, J., 1995. Te Artul Universe . Oxord: Oxord University Press.Barthes, R., 1967. Te Death o the Author. Aspen 5–6. [Reprinted in R. Barthes, 

Image, Music, ext , 142–148. Essays selected and translated by Stephen Heath,1977. London: Fontana Press].Binord, L. R., 1968. Archaeological perspectives. In S. R. Binord & L. R.

Binord (eds), New Perspectives in Archaeology , 5–32. Chicago: Aldine Press.Binord, L. R., 1972.   An Archaeological Perspective . New York & London:

Seminar Press.Bintli, J. L., 1991a. Post-modernism, rhetoric and scholasticism at AG: the

current state o British archaeological theory. Antiquity 65, 274–278.Bintli, J. L., 1991b. Te contribution o an  Annaliste /structural history 

approach to archaeology. In J. L. Bintli (ed.), Te  Annales School and  Archaeology , 1–33. London: Leicester University Press.

Bintli, J. L., 2000. Archaeology and the philosophy o Wittgenstein. InC. Holtor & H. Karlsson (eds), Philosophy and Archaeological Practice.Perspectives or the 21st Century , 153–172. Goteborg: Bricoleur Press.

Bintli, J. L., 2004a. ime, structure and agency: Te Annales, emergentcomplexity, and archaeology. In J. L. Bintli (ed.),   A Companion to

 Archaeology , 174–194. London & New York: Blackwell.

Bintli, J., 2004b. Experiencing archaeological eldwork. In J. Bintli (ed.), ACompanion to Archaeology , 397–405. London & New York: Blackwell.

Bintli, J. L., 2008. Chapter 10. History and Continental Approaches. InR. A. Bentley, H. D. G. Maschner & C. Chippindale (eds), Handbook o 

 Archaeological Teories , 147–164. Lanham (NY): Altamira Press.Chambers’ wentieth Century Dictionary . Edited by A.M. MacDonald.

Edinburgh: W. R. Chambers Ltd, 1972.Clarke, D. L., 1968 [revised edition 1978]).   Analytical Archaeology . London:

Methuen.Fuller, S., 2000. Tomas Kuhn. A Philosophical History or Our imes . Chicago:

University o Chicago Press.Harrison, R. . & Livingstone, D. N., 1982. Understanding in Geography:

Structuring the Subjective. In D. . Herbert & R. J. Johnston (eds),Geography and the Urban Environment , 1–39. Chichester: John Wiley.

Page 16: Chap 2 Bintliff Pp 7-22

8/3/2019 Chap 2 Bintliff Pp 7-22

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/chap-2-bintliff-pp-7-22 16/16

22 Te Death o Archaeological Teory 

Hodder, I., 1999. he Archaeological Process. An Introduction. London:Blackwell.

 Johnson, M., 1999. Archaeological Teory: An Introduction. Oxord: Blackwell.

  Johnson, M., 2004. Archaeology and social theory. In J. Bintli (ed.), ACompanion to Archaeology , 92–109. London: Blackwell.Kristiansen, K., 2004. Genes versus agents: A discussion o widening theoretical

gaps in archaeology. Archaeological Dialogues 11(2), 77–132.McNeill, W. H., 1986. Mythistory, or ruth, Myth, History, and Historians.

 American Historical Review 91, 1–10.Shennan, S., 2002. Genes, Memes and Human History: Darwinian archaeology 

and cultural evolution. London: Tames & Hudson.

illey, C., 1994.  A Phenomenology o Landscape. Places, Paths and Monuments .Oxord: Berg.rigger, B. G., 2006.   A History o Archaeological Tought . Second edition.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wilson, E. O., 1984. Biophilia. Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press.