History and Continental Approaches

Transcription

1 C H A P T E R 1 0 History and Continental Approaches John Bintliff [Au: Pls. supply definition for each acronym.] In this chapter we will look at a series of people and concepts which have not only been influential but whose ideas remain a significant area of stimulus to the way we think about and act in the world of archaeological interpretation. I would like to pinpoint some Continental ideas and practices which deserve greater attention outside the region. A detailed, person-byperson analysis of the variety of European Continental influences which have contributed to modern archaeological thinking, however, would lie outside the scope of this discussion. Whereas the practice of field archaeology possesses a mainstream consensus about methods of survey, excavation, and analysis of finds and contexts, which are the basis for a growing series of national and international guidelines promoted by professional organizations representing full-time public and commercial fieldworkers (such as the European Archaeology Association (EAA) and Society for American Archaeology (SAA) ), the same can hardly be said for the practice of archaeological theory. Since the late 1950s the discipline has been rent by endless academic disputes about the ways we should think about the past and its material remains, and how to make deeper sense of earlier societies. In this chapter I shall argue in line with the pioneering analysis of our greatest current historian of archaeology, Bruce Trigger (1989), that archaeological theory is strongly tied to Western intellectual fashions, amid the social and economic developments in Western society at large (Bintliff 1986, 1988, 1991a, 1993, 1995, 1996). THE SCIENTIFIC TRADITION Ideas and trends that remain relevant to archaeological thinking today can be1 traced back to the European Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a.d., with its epicenter in France but possessing important local foci in Germany and Britain (Porter 1991). This should be linked with the preceding scientific revolution which started earlier and overlapped in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Prominent in this tradition was a search for honesty and clarity of thought, free from religious and political ideology, and the belief that empirical, rational exploration of the world and its inhabitants would advance knowledge, and allow greater and more beneficial control for society over itself and its environment. Science, technology, and mathematics would be as much valued in this project as literature, the arts, and all the humanities. The core group can be seen as the French Encyclopedists. Among the factors accounting for the rise of the movement are the rise of the secular state, the growth of an educated, skeptical bourgeoisie whose wealth often came from entrepreneurial activity, the decline in religious belief and status based on class and patronage, and the shock of wider insights into human nature created by colonialism and capitalism. In the early to mid-nineteenth century, a countermovement arose to prominence in Europe, romanticism (Honour 1979), with close ties to nationalism, and expressive of a more human- and individualcentered view of the world. But in the later third of the century it was the scientific rational school which gained ground, especially enhanced by the impact of Darwin s theory in the Origin of Species, which firmly placed humanity into its slot as the naked ape, a component of nature and hence best studied by natural science. The industrial and commercial revolutions, the triumph of European colonialism, and the widespread replacement of faith in God by faith in science, combined to remold the world and the way we fit into it. It would be hard to overestimate the significance of the Enlightenment tradition in the modern discipline of archaeology. When we create the geometry of excavation trenches, plot lithic finds in precise locations and refit their production waste, generate interpretative models of lithic scatters based on ethnographic case studies, or simulate the yearly round of the people concerned, all such exercises reflect the lasting impact of rational, comparative, experimental, and empirical practices propagated by the Enlightenment. Can we do without this? Most professionals in the public sphere will find such a question meaningless, but in archaeo- 147

2 logical academia the thought has been raised in the past generation, and attempts have been made and are being made to develop alternative ways of working and thinking. This recent critique of the Enlightenment way is, as always seems to be the case, not an original contribution to European thought from archaeological theorists but a transference of ideas from a specific opposition to rationalism that has surfaced in other disciplines since World War II: Is not pure reason a poor substitute for human feeling and human values? Since the Enlightenment fought the Church and any form of received wisdom that did not emanate from practical investigations, on what basis could it promote values? Did not the alliance forged by the scientific and later the industrial revolution with rational scientific thought, promote a dehumanizing approach to society, ultimately favoring global capitalism and totalitarian states, where the benefits of giant-scale planning and systems of economics were promoted to the exclusion of the awareness of individual rights and welfare? The base for these critiques was laid in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries by Continental thinkers such as Rousseau, Kant, and others, so the contemporary popularity of the anti-enlightenment movement in postwar Europe reminds us how ideas in the discipline do not unfold and interact fruitfully with others, but rather cycle in and out of fashion. Archaeological thought was briefly influenced by rationalism in its formative disciplinary era of the late eighteenth through the late nineteenth centuries. In the final decades of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century, interpretation in archaeology was heavily influenced by romanticism, even though field methods continued to develop on the basis of rationalism. The development of an extreme form of faith in rational scientific investigation, in contrast, founded on the success of the expansion of scientific thinking and practice in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was taken much further during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by the Frenchman Auguste Comte and the Viennese circle of philosophers and practitioners of science, in what became known as logical positivism (Kraft 1953). After World War II, scientism returned to dominance and seemed to offer an ideal physical lifestyle as well as socioeconomic growth and prosperity (Bintliff 1986). Although originating in the United States, the New (or processual) Archaeology (see Watson, chapter 3) was a rebirth of European Continental tradition of Enlightenment positivism, with its strong confidence in the knowability and cross-cultural intelligibility of society past and present (Clarke 1968; Binford and Binford 1968; Watson et al. 1984). The promotion of statistics and scientific analyses, computer simulations and calculations, symbolized the reuniting of archaeological thought with the scientific way. David Clarke s impressive and densely argued volume Analytical Archaeology (1968) directly placed itself in this tradition of hard scientific reasoning. Clarke also demonstrated a strong interest in the introduction into archaeology of systems analysis and computer logic, largely being developed in the United States but a research zone with important inputs from Continental mathematical researchers in a range of disciplines. Many methods diffused into New Archaeology out of New Geography, a preceding movement driven by the same cultural context, and here American, as well as German and Scandinavian, thinking was at work in promoting a systematic and scientific approach. Thus the geometrical approach to spatial analysis, still a point of great interest for many archaeologists, brought together the nineteenth- to early-twentiethcentury German theories about locational analysis proposed by von Thünen, Christaller, and Lösch with Scandinavian pioneers such as Hågerstrand, as well as geographical theorists from America who were inspired by that European Continental tradition (Haggett 1965). In archaeology, books such as David Clarke s Spatial Archaeology (1977) and Hodder and Orton s Spatial Analysis in Archaeology (1976) are directly inspired by this thread of geographic theorizing, while Clarke s Models in Archaeology (1972) selfconsciously imitated the landmark volume Models in Geography (Chorley and Haggett 1967). Its potential, despite waning interest in such a scientific approach, can be further developed (Bintliff 2002). The New Archaeology and New Geography were dominant but out of phase in the late 1960s to early 1980s and early 1960s to late 1970s, respectively. They have been replaced in mainstream thinking by renewed forms of romanticism in the shape of postmodern approaches (Bintliff 1991a, 1993). The change has, however, been partial. In Paleolithic archaeology, for example, scientific and Darwinian thinking remains dominant, while at the other end of the timescale, much historical archaeology (such as Classical and Near Eastern) is still slowly adopting aspects of New Archaeology, alongside influences from postmodernism, and in an eclectic fashion in which the two are 148 john bintliff

3 not distinguished as rivals. In the same way, physical geography remains firmly embedded in scientific positivism and empiricism, with cross-cultural generalization fundamental, whereas human geography is dominated by postmodern perspectives (Holt-Jensen 1999). Lewis Binford, one of the founders of 1960s New Archaeology, far from allowing himself to be consigned to the dustbin of irrelevance for younger scholars, has recently produced a massive, well-argued, and essential volume (Binford 2001) of ethnoarchaeology that elaborates on his influential middle-range theory (Binford 1977). MARXIST ARCHAEOLOGY Although in different ways, aspects of both the scientific tradition and postmodernist thinking in archaeology are imbued with a Marxist perspective (see McGuire, chapter 6), the theory of revolutionary change and class conflict that Marx and Engels invoked for fundamental change in the organization of world society (Marx and Engels 1967). In the late nineteenth century, German, British, and American prehistorians and social theorists were enthusiastic to outline the evolutionary development of human society based on Classical and Enlightenment theorizing, observations of native societies encountered through colonialism, and a belief in the innate superiority of Western colonial powers (Bintliff 1984; Trigger 1989). The key works by Bachofen, Tylor (1871), and Morgan (1871) proved a major source of seemingly historical information for the German social theorists Marx and Engels (Engels 1986), and were heavily drawn on for their more far-reaching projects linking the reconstructed past to the disputed present and the desired-for future. Savagery-barbarism-civilization (later transformed in twentieth-century social evolutionary scholarship into band-tribe-chiefdomstate), with associated transformations in gender relations, power structures, and concepts of property and forms of economy, were a powerful basis for the Marxist agenda for radical transformation of the human condition worldwide. This ironic link, between a philosophy of history suiting exploitative Western colonialism and its Marxist derivative aiming to destroy the foundations of that society, is not so strange when we consider that Marx wrote parts of his most important work while sitting in the reading room of that bastion of imperialism, the British Museum. Another key element in the rise of a stadial scheme for human social evolution was Darwinism. In fact Darwin was highly conservative politically, delaying publication of The Origin of Species for years because he feared its potentially disruptive consequences for maintaining the status quo of the class-based society of Western Europe, and he seriously believed that species competition could never be seen as improvement. This was a direct warning against a social misreading of his theory of biological evolution, a response to his perception that it would be easy to transfer the same principles to foster the natural assumption of power by the increasingly numerous working classes, whose labor was the real basis for Western commercial and industrial preeminence. Nevertheless, the British social philosopher Herbert Spencer adapted Darwin s powerful theory of the evolution of species into the notorious Social Darwinism, which even Darwin eventually fell prey to quoting without criticism. Both social evolutionary theory and formal Marxist theory for interpreting the human past belong to the scientific megaparadigm in Western thought. They both claimed to be scientific theories backed up by extensive use of ethnography, history, and increasingly prehistoric archaeology, drawing a broad brush scheme for the human past at a global level. When communist political regimes were established in Russia, Central and Eastern Europe during the first half of the twentieth century, Marxism was considered within these countries as a science, and archaeological publications tied empirical discoveries into the fundamental statements of key communist thinkers concerning social evolution as if they were proven historical facts. With the late-twentieth-century demise of European communism and the virtual disappearance of Marxists from academia and institutional life, we could be tempted to see Marxist thought as the precipitate of a social ideology, and thus more suited to consideration within our other grand movement of Continental thought: romanticism-idealism. This would be wrong however, since Marxists have always considered themselves to be purveyors of a close reading of historical evidence. The proof of this assignment to rationalism can be witnessed from the circumstance that in the decades following the end of World War II, there had taken place a vigorous promotion of social evolutionism within the New Archaeology, especially in North America hardly a land of Marxism. One of the central models in American New Archaeology was a reexploration of the evidence for, and deeper understanding of, stage schemes for the origins and development of human society on a global level. Given that post-processualism has achieved only limited success in replacing processualism in American archaeol- Histor y and Continental Approaches 149

4 ogy, a great deal of Americanist archaeology continues to concern itself with recognizing general principles for transformations in social forms, even if the simple stage schemes of the s are considerably modified. It remains to discuss the extent of Marxist influence on archaeological theory, once we move on from the fruitful interaction between social evolutionary theorists and political philosophy during the nineteenth century. Formal Marxists outside of communist countries had little effect on archaeological theory, with the exception of Gordon Childe, an Australian prehistorian who boldly affirmed his intellectual debt to Marxism in his social archaeological books and papers from the late 1930s onward (McNairn 1980). It has been claimed that Childe s probable suicide in the 1950s arose from a sense of personal failure in his wish to deploy archaeological results to assist in a sea change in European society s perception of itself (Gathercole 1971) in which his socialist dreams would have been realized. What actually seems to have happened was that Childe s reconstructions of Near Eastern and European social change in prehistory and protohistory, despite being modeled on his Marxist beliefs and current theories in British social anthropology, were so cleverly meshed with his excellent knowledge of the current evidence from excavations and museum collections, that scholars read his works as substitute history, ignoring the radical implications for contemporary social issues, which Childe saw as the ultimate aim of his highly popular books. In the same way, Childe s anthropological approach to the past, very different from the culture history narratives typical of the first half of the twentieth century, was rediscovered as an inspiration shortly afterward by New Archaeology with its avowedly anthropological approach to social analysis of the human past, and his Marxism was once again ignored (Bintliff 1984). Nonetheless, inspired by the atmosphere of international socialism that flourished in youthful antiestablishment circles in the s of Western Europe, a radical form of social archaeology did briefly resurface in formal attempts to develop a Western Marxist archaeology. The volume edited by Matthew Spriggs (1984) formed one of a small number of rallying points for increasing the profile of Marxism, but with minimal support from the large theory community in the United States. With just a handful of exceptions such as Randall McGuire (1992), the movement has essentially disappeared following the failure of the youth challenges to the Western establishment and the increasingly dominant grip of capitalist thinking at all levels of Western society (Harvey 1989). Elements of Marxist thinking have, however, resurfaced within postmodernism in terms of an inverted critique of power structures, calling for their dismantling in order to liberate individuals to develop their own futures. This reformulation, very far from Marx s vision of centrally reorganized societies in the hands of the working classes, is clearly compatible with the individualizing ideology promoted by postmodernism, as discussed below. Like all powerful ideas, then, Marxist analysis has the potential to be deployed in more than one theoretical paradigm. ROMANTICISM This great intellectual and artistic movement had its roots in the European rediscovery of historical roots, folk culture, and ethnic identity, and the value of individualism for societies under pressure from coercive forms of mass organization (capitalism), a process arising in the late eighteenth and blossoming through the nineteenth century. Germany was a key source of many of the movement s concepts and practices. Contingent historical factors include the threatening but also liberating stimulus provided for most of Continental Europe by the Napoleonic imperial conquests, and the proliferation of European nation-states. It has even been argued (Colley 1994) that despite the absence of French occupation, the wars with France during this period helped forge a British sense of identity hitherto lacking. Late-nineteenth-century archaeology learned from this inspiration to focus its attention on the history of peoples ancestral to the early modern nation-states; the same scenarios should be reconstructed for much earlier, prehistoric societies, even if they were not necessarily ancestral. Just as with historically attested nations, earlier peoples would have had their rise and fall, dispersal or contraction, distinct ways of life, political organization, and worldview. This is the basis for the culture history tradition in our discipline. The increasing detail of archaeological excavation and recording was allowing regionally distinct assemblages to be recognized, and it was especially the achievement of German and Scandinavian prehistorians to create methods of typological-chronological analysis designed to isolate the rise and fall of these archaeological cultures or past peoples. Gustav Kossinna was one of the most prominent of these culture historians, and although his search for vital characteristics of prehistoric peoples (Kossinna 1911) was later put to 150 john bintliff

5 shameful use by the Nazi ideologues (national origins could be read as those of an antique master race destined for world domination), the same culture method was put to even wider use through its influence on the Australian theorist Gordon Childe, who combined large-scale culture history narratives of Near Eastern and European prehistory with stage schemes for social evolution more akin to the scientific paradigm, plus significant inspiration from socialist and Marxist theory. Childe was a pioneer in archaeological theory, and his work was too intellectually wide-ranging to allow easy categorization. In the first half of the twentieth century, culture history was the main intellectual approach to past peoples (Bintliff 1984; Trigger 1989), especially with Classical and biblical archaeology, with their emphases on specific historic significance and unique character of the peoples of the Bible or of the Greeks and Romans. Some societies were more innovative than others, and hence culture change did not occur everywhere and at the same rate, but was brought through diffusion or colonization from a few core centers of progress to the more numerous static and peripheral peoples of the world. The renewed explosion of enthusiasm for science and rationalism which followed World War II, as we have seen earlier, swept as much through the social sciences as the popular imagination, and this manifested itself in the New Archaeology, which rapidly transformed prehistory but remained an avant-garde and largely ignored facet of historical archaeologies in the Old World into the 1980s and beyond. The largescale and positivist New Archaeology, as with New Geography, reflecting the statist and big business focus of postwar Western society, was eclipsed in the 1970s to 1980s by the rise of postmodernism. Postprocessual archaeology (see Shanks, chapter 9) is a genuine child of the larger movement, but is also a revival of romanticism. First let us clarify its contextual sources. As convincingly argued in David Harvey s study The Condition of Postmodernity (1989), the 1970s witnessed a severe economic crisis in Western economies and a concomitant decline in statist attitudes by Western governments to the management of its citizens, alongside the breaking up of the previous monolithic and nationally based, place-centered production processes. At the same time that the state threw individual citizens increasingly onto their own resources and grew remoter in access, the world of work announced to its employees that they were disposable pawns in a competitive global environment. The welfare cushion of the state and the job for life at the factory or in the office or academic department became increasingly eroded or abolished. The feeling of political involvement, and hence an interest in active political philosophies, declined rapidly after the failure of the 1960s street activism and radicalization of citizens. Postmodernity, essentially founded on Continental intellectual concepts and texts, offered to replace the old certainties with new ones, empowering citizens through claiming both to explain the new world and offer guidelines in how to successfully navigate through it. We are, it turns out, active individuals, not social groups, while no certainties are sustainable (see Gardner, chapter 7). Power is everywhere, to be revealed and contested. But if the battle for individual survival is no longer on the streets or in the formal arenas of politics or in union confrontations with management, where does the postmodern person find space to resist the powerful? These questions and answers from postmodernism were essentially one of the most forceful exports from European thought since the first flowering of Romanticism in the early nineteenth century, and it was French and German thinkers who provided the relevant literature sociologists, political theorists, philosophers, and literary theorists such as the Frankfurt School (Geuss 1981), Foucault (1970), Derrida (1993), and Barthes (1972). Special attention was devoted to words written and spoken, since human communication was seen as the central key to the creation, reproduction, and manipulation of human social and political structures. Other forms of symbolic communication such as art were added to the package, and older Continental theorists whose ideas were central to the group were promoted, such as the Swiss Saussure s theories of language (Saussure 1983), and the French anthropologist Lévi- Strauss s structuralism (1963). Indeed one critique of postmodernism s literary turn has been that Continental intellectuals, having witnessed the failure of physical action on the streets and in the workplace during 1968, displaced their efforts to change the world into arenas where they could be truly dominant the lecture hall, seminar room, and the intellectual publication. Here the medium was essentially text and word and hence arose the dogma that society is essentially reproduced through these forms of human behavior. By extension, houses and mobile objects could be assimilated into text in the belief that they also were forms of human communication. In focusing now on the way in which Continental postmodernism was imported into archaeology as Histor y and Continental Approaches 151

6 post-processualism, during the 1980s up till the present, we shall see that the primary researchers adopting the program were English theorists such as Ian Hodder, Michael Shanks, John Barrett, and Christopher Tilley. Appropriately, in their applications to everyday artifacts as well as symbolic communication in art and architecture, we find a central concern for the active individual, the relativity of knowledge, the omnipresence of power, all themes characteristic of postmodernism. The heritage of romanticism combines with the dislike of cross-cultural generalization and the interest in individuals into a belief that all societies are unique, their parts likewise contesting with each other, and at times our own historical context prevents us from appreciating past societies fully owing to that very property of uniqueness. Archaeology as a discipline is subject to deconstruction for its blatant and largely invisible power structures. For some post-processualists, the impossibility of stepping into the shoes of past people means that our modern interpretations are inevitably tainted by being a reflection of our own society, although they have varied views on how far they consider the task of revealing what really happened in the past as still feasible or all but impossible (Gazin-Schwartz and Holtorf 1999; Shanks 1997; Hodder 1999). Curiously, one of the opening themes of interest within post-processualism was structuralism, which sat rather uneasily within the fully developed postmodern paradigm. The French social anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1963) had developed his research into the reflection of mental ordering principles into kinship systems, narratives, and other aspects of human culture during the postwar decades, with a small but enthusiastic following in cultural anthropology by the 1960s and 1970s. In the early 1980s Ian Hodder conducted his own ethnoarchaeological fieldwork in Africa and saw a great potential in envisaging archaeological cultural assemblages as forms of silent communication in which ways of thought and social norms were being reflected or contested through patterning in the placement of objects and structures, or in their ornamentation (Hodder 1982a,b,c). However within a few years, before the end of the 1980s, Hodder distanced himself from structuralism on the grounds that it left no space for the individual or unique form of individual cultures in their own specific time and place (Hodder 1986). Indeed structuralism is a grand narrative that claims applicability in all times and places and is based on the concept that each society, as well as the human mind in general, have a language embodying rules or concepts which are expressed verbally or through symbolic aspects of material culture. Another difficulty viewed by critics of the application to archaeology was the ease with which assertion could free itself from any form of confirmation. When Hodder claimed that women makers of milk containers in Kenya decorated them with particular care in order to challenge the male dominance of their society, and the women themselves stated that their art was done for pleasure, there was no awareness that the insider view represented a challenge to the reading of the academic outsider (Hodder 1986; Bintliff 1988:16 17). Nonetheless, many post-processualists find the symbolic reading of material culture a fruitful approach and it remains widely in use. An improvement in credibility was achieved by shifting attention from Lévi-Strauss and his rather too simplistic search for recurring cross-cultural structures of the mind, to another French cultural anthropologist, Pierre Bourdieu, by Hodder and others (Hodder 1990). Bourdieu s concept of habitus envisaged patterning in human behavior, as reflected in the form and interior plan and decoration of houses for example, as a text in which a set of values were both presented and thus reinforced from generation to generation, without the conscious intention of the members of that society (Bourdieu 1977). This more flexible theory allows for changes in behavior to have unintended effects on the reproduction of certain ways of life. The criticism remains nonetheless that a modern reading of a pattern of house architecture or burial form in the absence of past voices such as in contemporary texts, is prone to circularity of reasoning how can we know that the interpretation corresponds to any conscious views of the past society concerned? Chris Tilley s (1991) analysis of Bronze Age rock carvings of Scandinavia is a case in point, because they are translated by cross-cultural ethnohistoric analogy without testing for any reliable connection to that particular prehistoric society. It was Hodder, however, who most prominently shifted archaeological theory from structuralism into a set of theories loosely termed post-structuralism, all taken from Continental developments in the humanities (Hodder 1986). The specific influences here we have briefly mentioned earlier the focus on open and hidden power structures in the past and present, the role of text and symbolic behavior, but not in a global mind-set approach as in structuralism, rather through flexible and dialectic relationships in which individual agents appropriate or resist through words 152 john bintliff

7 and images, and discrete actions. The concern with power built on two parallel postwar influences, one being the German school of Western Marxist-inspired thought represented by scholars in the Frankfurt School (Adorno, Benjamin, Marcuse and Habermas; cf. Geuss 1981), the other a similarly inspired French intellectual movement including Foucault, Derrida, and Barthes. The French group was especially active in textuality, a movement easily transferred to viewing material culture as text. For archaeology, poststructuralism invited theorists to study power structures both in the contemporary profession and in representations of the past (Shanks and Tilley 1987; Tilley 1990; Leone and Preucel 1992; Shanks 2004). As happened earlier to proponents of the Continental versions, however, critics have challenged the tendency for archaeological post-structuralists to generalize and lay down guidelines and set approaches, rebuilding the hegemonic, global principles of the New Archaeology. Recently Hodder has argued that these failings can only be addressed by pursuing the individual, and diversity, more boldly (Hodder 1999). In his major field project at the Neolithic town of Çatalhöyük, Hodder has been attempting this form of relativistic philosophy through a new method of dispersing authority among the excavation and interpretation team he directs (Hodder 2000; for skepticism on the reality, see Hassan 1997). A related philosophical approach of Continental, specifically Germanic, origin is phenomenology. It was the eighteen-century Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant who believed we could deploy technical means to penetrate the mysteries of the everyday tangible qualities of material life (phenomena), but that we must resort to metaphysical intuition to understand the essence of human existence (the noumena), resurrecting Platonic idealism. Phenomenology in subsequent Germanic treatments, however, by Husserl and Heidegger (1962), branched away from this original philosophical program (which was created by Kant to protect religious faith from the materialist approaches of Enlightenment science) by a rejection of the scientific project altogether. In this later nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century phenomenology, the everyday materiality of the world is entirely overlain by the distinctive subjective worldview of human beings. Like the metaphysical sphere of Kant, this was solely suited for a cultural investigation based on human intuitive understandings of the society one was born into. Despite its importance in the development of philosophy, the relevance of this program for archaeological theory was not apparent until the late twentieth century, with the rise of postmodernism in the social sciences. The negative stance toward rational analysis, the prominence of culturalism in the understanding of everyday life artifacts as items deployed in a symbolic text representing the worldview of a particular society these aspects of the later form of phenomenology meshed well for archaeology with other core concepts of the postmodernist agenda. Julian Thomas (Thomas 1996, 2004), for example, has explored the changing mental concepts in later prehistoric Britain rather than forms of economy, and Chris Tilley (1994) made a strong impact with The Phenomenology of Landscape that is inspiring a growing number of imitative projects. For Tilley, monumental prehistoric landscapes such as the Stonehenge-Avebury region in southern Britain or the bleak moorlands of southwest Britain with their burial cairns and carved open-air rock art, are primarily to be understood in a specific phenomenological way: gone is the interest in the way people farmed the land or herded their stock, or the evidence for chiefdoms or big men, favored by previous researchers into these landscapes such as Renfrew (1973) and Fleming (1988). Instead, Tilley and his followers invite us to walk between or around these monuments and achieve empathy with their constructors through aesthetic appreciation of the placing of the monuments within the natural landscape and in relation to each other. The prehistoric landscape is a cultural construct whose essential raison d être was to convey concepts about supernatural powers including the ancestors and the symbolic structure of the human society responsible. Without a doubt, the revival of interest in worldviews was timely after too much processual (see Watson, chapter 3) emphasis on functional considerations of economics and power, and especially in relation to ritual monuments with undoubted symbolic representations. On the other hand, to give renewed attention to the neglected aspect of cultural worldview in any society should not require us to drop any interest in central questions such as: how did people feed themselves? What forms of social organization dominated and how did these alter over time and under what pressures for change? What is the link between conscious belief, noncognized worldviews or habitus, economic mode and sociopolitical structure in a particular past society? The monochrome concern with a particular insight blinds us to paying equal attention to the benefits of applying a multiple approach to the past. Histor y and Continental Approaches 153

8 The virtue of seeing phenomenology as a precipitate of its age, and hence a very partial approach to the rural world, can be seen if we ask why Tilley and his imitators emphasize their view of landscape as the ideal and essential way into the prehistoric world, rather than others. As I have shown at length in a recent article (Bintliff, in press), the culturalist vision of landscape in Britain appeared at a point in time when the countryside was rapidly losing its traditional farming communities supplying the majority of food in Britain, resulting in a countryside largely empty of active inhabitants. Those remaining have increasingly relied on national and European Community subsidies to sustain the appearance of country activity, and this has more and more taken on the form of a rural heritage role, allowing the majority of the population urban dwellers and foreign tourists to visit the countryside and see it preserving sufficient signs of fields and pastures, old farmhouses and field walls, and so on, to gratify their feelings of the Other, nostalgia for a mythical preurban romanticized rural past. For postmodern urbanites, trapped in the capitalist and materialist swirl of their working lives, escape into an alternative environment seemingly representing spiritual and aesthetic values, forms a comforting break from their everyday lives. Even for postmodern academics such as Chris Tilley or his colleague Barbara Bender at London University (Bender et al. 1997), enclosed within the capitalistic-orientated world of British university life, the phenomenology of landscape provides a similar physical and emotional alternative to modern production-line academia. The rural world they are interested in is without food production or installations of power and coercion, but rather a picturesque heritage park where walking and gazing stimulate lost mind worlds of prehistoric cultures. Another important post-processual approach in archaeological theory is the structuration theory of the British sociologist Anthony Giddens (Giddens 1984). The active individual in society creates, recreates, or dissolves the structures of social life through daily communicative encounters with other members of society. In the archaeological applications the importance of agents (see Gardner, chapter 7) is contrasted with the processual focus on social groups or whole societies, or forms of social organization, for example, chiefdoms. A well thought-out application of structuration is the prehistorian John Barrett s (1994) Fragments from Antiquity. Giddens s approach is one of the main sources of inspiration for his theory. One valid criticism of archaeological theory is its tendency to introduce ideas from other disciplines without their associated discussion on the strengths and weaknesses of those ideas. Such is the case here. Archaeologists who find structuration theory valuable (Dobres and Robb 1999) have assumed that this notable sociologist derived his approach from empirical research among modern well-observed societies, thus enhancing its reliability. In fact this is far from the case, since his fundamental source was actually another theory, that of the Swiss linguistic theoretician Fernand de Saussure (Baber 1991; Clegg 1992). Saussure argued the value of separating off the basic structure of a language, its grammar and vocabulary for example, from its variable and flexible use by individuals. This brief summary suggests some obvious weaknesses in postmodernity and its translation into archaeological theory, but there are also good points. The New Archaeology was often far too optimistic concerning the power of positivist reasoning, even sometimes claiming that laws of human behavior could be derived like those cherished in the natural sciences (Fritz and Plog 1970). Large-scale models favored in processualism left little space for the lives or intentions of individuals, while ecology and technology governed the changing concepts and beliefs. Archaeology was frequently seen as having become a neutral scientific practice, despite the continuing concern of states to fund archaeology on national agendas. INTEGRATED INTELLECTUAL PROGRAMS FROM THE CONTINENT To the present day the discourse in archaeological theory has been one of competing dominance. Just as New Archaeologists dismissed the formerly dominant culture history version of the romantic tradition, so in turn the revival of romanticism in the guise of post-processualism proclaimed the misguidedness of New Archaeology. Thus Mathew Johnson s Introduction to Archaeological Theory (1999), for all its stimulating content, is primarily a propaganda vehicle for the virtues of post-processualism and the inadequacies of processualism. As someone who has experienced all these traditions from the inside as a university student taught by and encouraged to study the leading exponents of culture history, at the same time as young lecturers were distracting us with the first publications of the New Archaeology, then in later years to observe how these young rebels were consigned to old fogy status by postprocessualists any balance seems sorely lacking. When David Clarke (1973) in a heavily cited paper entitled Archaeology: The Loss of Innocence claimed that 154 john bintliff

9 processualism was about to achieve an absolute purity of method and theory, free of previous ideology and bias, he was as far from the truth as other intellectual gurus within processualism and post-processualism who offered their borrowed finery from Continental traditions to garner serious recognition from other disciplines. The reality has been a succession of ideologies, driven by the desire of each generation of new scholars in Western society to assume the high status of their predecessors through the simplest method replace the previous orthodoxies with others and remove the latter from serious consideration (the strategies of bibliographic exclusion and scholasticism). If we move several levels higher up, to the longerterm perspective of the Western intellectual tradition, this alternation of reason and feeling, exemplified by the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century movements of the Enlightenment and romanticism, has a much older history. The German philosopher Nietzsche dubbed European intellectual traditions as conforming to two strands in ancient Greek intellectual life: the Apollonian was the bright power of reason and order; the Dionysian was the overwhelming influence of feeling and emotion (Nietzsche 1999). In their art forms and intellectual systems the Greeks conceived of the human experience as created by a dialectic between forces within humans and in human relations with divine powers. Thus one is entitled to ask whether these aspects could be fruitfully combined in archaeological theory. This last section will focus on Continental approaches to humanity, especially the human past, which allow for the supposedly contradictory emphases of Dionysian-Apollonian, romantic and Enlightenment, postmodern and modern traditions to be deployed together within a single mode of study of the human condition (Figure 10. 1, from Bintliff 1993.). The fact that (as in geography) whole sectors of archaeology have settled into divergent philosophies, with Paleolithic specialists by and large remaining positivist and Darwinian, Classical, and Near Eastern experts practicing attached to Cultural Historical aims, whilst later Prehistory and European post-roman archaeology are the playgrounds of postmodernism, highlights a practical need to recreate a unified discipline without the demand for victory or surrender. Nonetheless, the attraction to each generation of displacing their teachers by moving the intellectual goalposts is a good deal easier than building on past work to sharpen and improve it, which offers less easy fame and an uneasy dependence on older scholars. One source of motivation is the potential for integrating the works of stimulus and skill by generations older than the recent schools with the knowledge of the important achievements of culture history, processual and postprocessual scholarship. WITTGENSTEIN Here is a good example of some of the points just made. I believe that Kevin Greene (2002: ) and I are probably the only scholars in the world who have found the works of the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein worthy of consideration for the purposes of archaeological theory (Bintliff 2000). This could be seen as surprising, as Wittgenstein has frequently been cited as the most important philosopher of the twentieth century, and all authorities seem to agree that he is at least one of the most significant intellects of that era. Figure Strands in archaeological theory as reflections of cyclical dominance by two main intellectual traditions in Western intellectual life. Their merger into a single enriched approach is already possible through combining recent developments in history (Annales School) and science (chaos-complexity theory). After Bintliff (1993). Histor y and Continental Approaches 155

10 Figure Archaeology as a set of complementary discourses, inspired by Wittgensteinian discourse and intellectual toolbox theory. After Bintliff (1993). Wittgenstein s achievement causes most of his readers to hold their breath; he claimed to have made the discipline of philosophy entirely redundant. All the more amazing that his successors in the discipline still find his works highly significant, since he felt he had removed their right to employment. The essence of Wittgenstein s late work is to eliminate the kinds of difficult intellectual debates which philosophy had seen as its primary role in the world. Rather than seeing an endless spectrum of ideas and beliefs, and forms of analysis and argument, vying with each other to offer the way to truth or sense in and of the world, Wittgenstein argued that humans rely on different discussions, or discourses, involving public communication between individuals. Depending on the context, each discourse is associated with its own way of talking, presenting appropriate material for communication, and furthering discussion. He used the analogy of a plumber or electrician, who brings on his job a tool bag full of different implements, since every task deserved the correct artifacts. This simple insight is powerful (figure 10.2). If, for example, one excavates a medieval monastery, the reconstruction of its building history from the soil requires scientific skills in stratigraphy, soil science, technical understanding of medieval architectural principles, the typology of ceramics and coins, and this would be allied with the reports of historians working with church archives and secular annals to sift out the most likely reality from often elaborated records. But once a beautiful three-dimensional computer simulation of the site has recreated based on scientific analysis of the fauna and flora its meadows, fishponds, and fields full of crops, as well as the practical workings of the religious community, we are still far from empathy with the inhabitants of the monastery. Even with plentiful reference to contemporary texts on the daily life of the religious order and the lay priests and their servants and workforce, we surely need much more to encounter the mentality of the society whose buildings and objects, graves and rubbish are under the microscope. Comprehending the religious life requires us to drop the scientific discourse and open another one, in which we refer to our metaphysical intimations and experiences of anything supernatural. The scientific and the religious discourse are in no way incompatible; they are complementary, and the richness of human life is inconceivable without them. And yet a Marxist, perhaps atheistic, would at once object that so far we have avoided any mention of the class war, of the subordination of parts of human society to others, involving exploitation in a hierarchy of production and consumption. Immediately a gender theorist would in turn object that the medieval Church enforced a rigid subordination of religious women to men, even in the framework of a convent. Indeed a Marxist discourse and a gender discourse (which might group together as politics discourse) are absolutely appropriate to any deeper analysis of religious communities in the Middle Ages, and open up perspectives missing in the scientific and metaphysical discourses mentioned earlier. Alongside the discourses relevant to this imaginary case study, Darwinian discourse (Bentley et al., chapter 8; and Collard et al., chapter 13) is also valuable in studying any past or present society, since much of human behavior is a product of our heritage as the third chimpanzee (Diamond 1992). What would our world be like if we excluded sex, violence, ambition, a primary concern for the welfare of our relatives and offspring, an adaptation for symbolic communication, socialization and high intelligence, all aspects of the species we belong to for the past 150,000 years? How much would Wittgenstein s approach to human society impact on archaeological theory? He would find the debate between Apollonian reason and Dionysian emotion merely alternative tools for focusing on different aspects of the same society and historical context. At a blow the millennial ebb and flow of the two approaches evaporates complimentarily. This requires us to start afresh with tackling any society: measuring its technical characteristics with statistics and computers, searching for possible cross-cultural regularities is a worthwhile methodology, but only in parallel with an empathetic enquiry into how people conceived of their world and expressed themselves verbally in text and image, or in deliberately patterned 156 john bintliff

11 structures and artefacts. Can we present case studies which are richer than the partial visions of the processualists or post-processualists, for example? Very easily, and once again it is on the European Continent where this has been achieved, if under different influences than German-speaking philosophy. THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY IN THE ANNALES SCHOOL OF FRENCH HISTORIANS Already at the turn of the twentieth century in France, a number of radical young scholars in sociology, history, and geography turned their backs on the restricted perspectives of their disciplines and began to converge consciously on a more holistic approach to human society, present and past, and its behavior in space. The ultimate precipitate was a periodical, still vibrant today, as Annales, Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations, and following a series of highly influential books and articles, the work which best exemplifies the movement appeared just after the World War II, Fernand Braudel s massive historical work The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (1972). The nationalistic preoccupations of history prevented this masterpiece from having major global effect until long afterward, when it was translated into English for publication in 1972, but since then the importance of this strand in French intellectual life has grown in the discipline of history. Even later, in the early 1990s, archaeology began to acknowledge the fertile potential of the Annalistes (Bintliff 1991b, 2004a; Knapp 1992; Barker 1995). In its formulation by Braudel (Figure 10.3), the human past is considered to be the product of forces or processes operating at different timescales yet onto each moment of discrete time, in parallel. Our perception of the world is focused on events and people, the scale of observation and insight we all can actively participate in within our lifetimes the world of the first level of Annales history the world of events, or the short term (evénéments). Yet at the same time, forces at work over several lifetimes or several centuries affect any one period of the past, hardly clear to contemporaries but the object of reconstruction by historians and archaeologists the world of the medium-term (moyenne durée). Finally there are historical processes unfolding at an even slower pace a millennium, many millennia or even for the Palaeolithic era hundreds of millennia this is the world of the long-term (longue durée). Let me give an example of a variable-wave structural history in archaeology (Bintliff 1991b). In my own fieldwork region of Boeotia, central Greece, a Greek city called Haliartos is destroyed by the Roman army in 171 b.c. and its population killed or enslaved. That city was the victim of a cruel short-term ebb and flow of luck, when competing armies of great powers threatened small city-states and demanded allegiance and practical support surrendering to one immediate threat could lead to annihilation by an opponent coming next on the scene, and such was the fate of Haliartos. But the city was also the product by 171 b.c. of a process of the medium term, the filling-up of the Boeotian landscape by modular city-states and dependent villages at regular intervals of four of five kilometers, begun around 700 b.c. or even earlier, and whose flourishing population and economy nourished a regional version of High Classical Greek culture and political complexity (Bintliff 1994, 1999). By 171 b.c. the time of these multiple small states was violently confronted by a novel replacement form of great Hellenistic kingdoms and the supranational republican state of Rome, a clash of medium-term political formations in which the older version stood no chance against its replacement for the following six hundred years. And yet the climax in turn of these (now dying) city-states had been the product of a long-term phenomenon, the gradual and uneven buildup in Greece of complex, urbanized, socially Figure The structural history favored by French historians of the Annales School. From Bintliff (1991b). Histor y and Continental Approaches 157