Different Theoretical Approaches to Archaeology
Lesson Objectives: Compare culture history, processual, and postprocessual approaches.
What is the culture history approach in archaeology? It means the descriptive, normative, laying out of material culture according to a temporal framework and interpreting behavior during the different time periods. It is necessary to do culture history to establish baseline data over time and space. It is the kind of archaeology that has been historically done the most, and is still done to establish foundations for more scientific approaches.
What is processual archaeology? It used to be called the “New Archaeology” and emerged out of the intellectual currents of the 1960s (or even earlier); it includes concern with natural environments and ecosystems, human and civil rights, and rigorous mathematics and statistics and computers and other instrumentation. It means the application of scientific method to archaeology, and should include utilizing specialists in other fields such as zoology, botany, chemistry, physics, remote sensing, computer modeling, systems theory, and so forth. The “new” archaeologists were unhappy with culture history’s method of simply listing traits for different cultures but not explaining mechanisms for culture change except for some vague notions of invention and diffusion of ideas. They are concerned with culture process, asking how did systems work and change and what are the functions of artifacts, activity areas, and whole sites and systems. Much of processual archaeology is based in cultural materialism, the social science framework that explains culture in terms of the technoenvironmental constraints (what are the available technologies and natural resources?).
What is postprocessual archaeology? In sum, it can be seen as a humanistic approach, or as emic archaeology, attempting to get at the past peoples' own views of how they did things and what was significant. It derives from postmodern philosophy in the social sciences, which actually originated in the field of literary criticism. Though it is an awkward term, it has also been called or thought at least to include contextual, symbolic, or critical archaeology. Each of these seeks to understand how material items symbolized various things and had specific meaning to the people who made them, and how our scientific biases toward simple function and technology mask our view of individual human beings in the past and what they might have been thinking. Needless to say, emic archaeology is very hard to do with prehistory. We might infer what might have been meaningful to the prehistoric people from what they left behind, for example, but it is very hard to discern what the meaning was. However, it works better with historic archaeology because we may have texts to indicate what past people considered significant. One segment of postprocessual archaeology includes several varieties of Marxist viewpoints, most of which envision the past as the common people’s struggle for empowerment and resistance against domination by elites. Possibly the most useful aspect of postprocessual archaeology is critical theory, which points out all the many biases inherent in archaeological interpretation and in the profession itself. The numbers of Native American or African-American archaeologists in the U.S. still are ridiculously small, for example, and interpretations of ancient peoples are still dominated by pictures of men doing everything. A major emphasis lately in postprocessual archaeology has been in gender studies and feminist archaeology, though these can of course be done in a processual context as well.
Most archaeology done today is predominantly processual, with spatial and temporal aspects established by culture history and the awareness of bias brought in by postprocessual thinkers. We need to use all approaches as well as possible and be aware of the shortcomings of each. We also need awareness of how archaeology is done in the intellectual atmosphere and politics of the times. Today’s “science wars” have been triggered by a kind of postmodern impatience with the biased investigator, even though every investigator is biased! We will examine bias in the latest archaeological discoveries to come out in the news while we are in this class. Controversies surrounding the discoveries are always juicy to discuss, and arguments from many sides can be found in weekly scholarly publications such as Science, Science News, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and many others, nearly all of which are easily available online as well as in the library.
For example, in 2002, a discovery making the daily news was the engraved ocher fragments from Blombos Cave in South Africa dated to 77,000 years ago, suggesting modern-looking human symbolic behavior. The science aspects can be explored in discussing the limits of radiocarbon dating to go far enough back in time, in questioning of the method of thermoluminescence dating, and in the debates on the timing for emergence of biologically modern humans. Humanities aspects of the story might be whether the cross-hatched lines are art or if there symbolic meaning of some other kind. There are also the political and professional issues: the great expense for the research in a poor country, the primacy of European-based explanations, and the world political situation applied to South Africa and its indigenous peoples today (see, for example, Rossouw 2002).