Archaeology and archaeological theory

I was asked my opinion regarding what archaeology needs for a brighter future – and these opinions, as per custom, tend to drag in all sorts of polemical stances. The desire to polemicize is not what motivates this contribution: much on the contrary, my objective is not to present a new and revolutionary view for the advancement of archaeology. However, in this day and age, it seems that ‘new’ has become the new normal (no pun intended), and thus, by claiming that archaeology should stay relatively unchanged, I might actually be making the most polemical statement of all. Naturally, stating that archaeology should remain mostly unchanged is not claiming that archaeology has reached its full potential – it is rather that archaeology will improve itself and turn out just fine regardless of what archaeological theorists proclaim. There are only so many ways to reinvent the wheel and often the wheel is neither necessarily new nor better. Stepping back, I ask, ‘does archaeology require a paradigmatic overhaul?’ and I will try to answer this question and justify my answer as best as I can.

It is the hallmark of any science that wishes to be reputable to demonstrate to other sciences and to society at large that, yes, our science is indeed advancing and we are challenging the limits of what can be done and known. Archaeology is no exception and archaeological theorists are the most vocal in advocating progress. What is particularly curious is the fact that while theoretically minded scholars are usually the ones who consistently appeal for revolutionary changes in the discipline, there is no explanation of why theory is considered an advance in and of itself. In the last decades, archaeologists have simply established as fact that new theories and approaches have the same value as, if not more value than, engaging with the material record and providing new empirical discoveries.

Granted, there are scholarships, professorships and project funds on the line and submitting proposals with new and innovative research does give an edge in the competition, but how long will it take for the funding entities to realize that ‘new’ does not necessarily translate into ‘better’? By flooding the approved journals and publishers with new ‘revolutionary’ theories and approaches we have trivialized the capacity to truly improve the state of the art. Furthermore, the introduction of new ideas is rarely done innocently and in a humble fashion – it is usually accompanied by uncritical disdain and disregard of competing ideas. A viable project for a pluralist stance (Bintliff and Pearce Reference Bintliff, Pearce, Bintliff and Pearce2011) seems further from fruition every year that passes, a stance that would have allowed for a respectable integration of archaeology among its sibling disciplines – history and anthropology.

It could be argued that archaeology does hold a solid place among history and anthropology, but it certainly does not seem that way. While anthropology is currently undergoing an original ontological reawakening, history is thriving in the wake of postmodern critique and gradually developing itself into a discipline that is no longer naively empiricist. Archaeology, on the other hand, is thriving just like anthropology and history, but unlike its older siblings the youngest sibling is getting all the wrong advice. Archaeological theorists seem to be running out of ideas and many theorists, instead of stepping back for some self-reflection, are just grabbing at whatever is closest at hand. Whether it is a new hip sociologist with a French-sounding name or a philosopher whose name has too many consonants and not enough vowels, what seems to matter is not content or even compatibility – only difference. If it is different, then it must be good. This rash and unbridled attitude is indeed going to make archaeology improve, but not necessarily in the best of ways. By simply adopting whatever is hip and sexy in other disciplines, archaeology learns the hard way that not all external influences are legitimate.

One of the most glaring cases would be the mingling of archaeology with Graham Harman's object-oriented ontology, or OOO (Harman Reference Harman2002; Reference Harman2011), allegedly one of the pillars of speculative realism. OOO is, at first glance, very appealing. In Harman, some archaeologists saw the chance to be revolutionary and simultaneously ride the wave of the so-called ontological turn (Edgeworth Reference Edgeworth2016; Normark Reference Normark, Alexandersson, Andreeff and Bünz2014; Olsen 2010, 68 ff.; Olsen et al. Reference Olsen2012). However, an attentive reading of his work discloses some glaring red flags. What is speculative realism? Speculative realism claims to be a form of post-Kantian metaphysical realism that aims to surpass the subject–object dualism. A brief look into the authors generally associated with speculative realism, Quentin Meillassoux, Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant and Graham Harman, shows that there is little to nothing in common between them. Of these four authors, only Meillassoux can be qualified as a speculative realist (Meillassoux Reference Meillassoux2008). This is strange because Harman claims to be a speculative realist (Harman Reference Harman2013) as his OOO is supposed to be a form of post-Kantian Continental materialism. Well, as Peter Wolfendale (Reference Wolfendale2014) and Ray Brassier (Reference Brassier and Wolfendale2014) have demonstrated, there is nothing within Harman's OOO that makes it speculative realism, nor does it actually surpass the subject–object dualism. The only relationship that can be established between Harman and speculative realism is that he attended two conferences titled Speculative Realism. Also disquieting are the actual problems of OOO, with the most obvious problem being Harman's incapacity to define ‘object’ in a clear and concise manner (Brassier Reference Brassier and Wolfendale2014, 419–20), a problem that seems to similarly affect some archaeologists. The murkiness that surrounds OOO is not evidence of flexibility and anti-foundationalism so characteristic of Continental orthodoxy, but blatant dismissiveness. Ultimately, attaching OOO buzzwords and premises to archaeology does not lend it more credibility; it diminishes it.

What is more worrying is that non-anthropocentric and object-based metaphysics have been around in Anglo-American philosophy for a comfortable amount of time, comfortable enough that many of the issues broached by Graham Harman's OOO have already been discussed in a professional and assertive manner by the likes of Theodore Sider, David Lewis, E.J. Lowe and L.A. Paul. Unlike its Continental cousin, Anglo-American philosophy is unarguably one of the projects that has developed most in the last sixty years. It has transcended its ‘analytical’ boundaries to become an authoritative voice in ethics, cognitive sciences and quantum physics, to name just a few areas. Archaeological theorists, however, avoid Anglo-American philosophy as much as they can, further substantiating that the aim is simply to make archaeology newer, but not necessarily better.

Nonetheless, even without Anglo-American philosophy, archaeology does become better. It becomes better not only because archaeological theorists learn from their mistakes, but also because there are those who change archaeology from the sidelines. These nameless archaeologists are the vast majority and it is these who unconsciously and gradually add more insight into the past. They are the commercial archaeologists, the students of archaeology and the county archaeologists who, by making sure that archaeology is practised in a correct and proper manner, are already supporting its continued success. They improve archaeology by adding information to the ever-growing database of archaeological knowledge, they ask the modest yet essential questions, and they are mostly in constant contact with the lay populace. Like the wind that gradually erodes the rock, the nameless archaeologists are those who sculpt archaeology into something superior, while on the other side of the fence there are theorists who insist in new revolutions and proclaim the death of [insert irrelevant theory of the past here], the same theorists who think they can make an even better sculpture by simply borrowing a bulldozer and laying everything behind them to waste.

Does archaeology require a paradigmatic overhaul?

‘No’ is the only correct answer. However, we must admit that not all is well with archaeology and some effort must be put into making it better, and this seems clear to everyone. What is not entirely clear is what is wrong with archaeology and how it can be improved. One of the most common attitudes is to claim that the current archaeological standards and practices are inadequate to deal with the material record, even though the material record is the one unchanging object in our discipline. The material record of today is the same as when Flinders Petrie and Gordon Childe were around – and calling it something different (e.g. code, admixture, assemblage) does not change that fact. Thus when archaeologists decide to define the material record in a new way, archaeology is not actually becoming something new, much less is it undergoing a ‘turn’ or ‘paradigm shift’ (Lindstrøm Reference Lindstrøm2015, 212).

For instance, there was processual archaeology that expounded the virtues of laws of behaviour, systemic process and cultural evolutionism; then there was postprocessual archaeology that argued that post-structuralist theory and material culture as code were the way to go; and of course there are now several candidates to fully replace postprocessualism as the standard of reference, given that it has allegedly become, in the words of Bjørnar Olsen (Reference Olsen2012a, 11), ‘normalized, mainstream and hegemonic, [thus] leading to the theoretical lull that has characterized its aftermath’.

Bjørnar Olsen's intentionally polemical and hyperbolic phrasing is to cajole a reaction out of his readers which, truth be told, works like a charm (see responses to the article in question). What does not work as charmingly is the actual content behind his phrasing. The claim that postprocessualism has become normalized, mainstream and hegemonic is a bit of an exaggeration, and clearly a misattributed view of what postprocessualism actually represents in the long run. First, processualism and postprocessualism were of much more modest influence than assumed by those living in the English-speaking world (which includes Scandinavian countries for the sake of the current argument). In fact, a cursory look into any archaeological department in Portugal or Germany, respectively where I am originally from and where I currently am, reveals a sobering picture where processualism and postprocessualism are addressed only in a passing manner. This might make it seem that both Portugal and Germany are behind in terms of interpretation practices but the truth is that their archaeology is merely different, one that relies considerably less on a priori type theorizing (sensu Bintliff Reference Bintliff, Bintliff and Pearce2011).

Second, at the time it seemed that postprocessualists were banking on a revolution that would shake archaeology's foundational structures, one that would also affect archaeology on a methodological and inferential level. Barely did it do such a thing: Shanks and Tilley's alternative to ‘scientific’ archaeology (Shanks and Tilley Reference Shanks and Tilley1987, 135–240) shared the same characteristics as most scientific endeavours (Watson Reference Watson1990, 686); the excavation and retrieval methods employed by Hodder were pretty much the same as those recommended by Lewis Binford and Michael Schiffer (Tschauner Reference Tschauner1996); and even Hodder's hermeneutic approach did not manage to distance itself that much from middle-range theory on a methodological level (Kosso Reference Kosso1991). Overall, postprocessualism had little impact on the core scientific basis on which archaeology is founded (VanPool and VanPool Reference VanPool and VanPool1999).

Nevertheless, to further support the argument that postprocessualism became the establishment perspective, Olsen (Reference Olsen2012a, 14) transcribes a quote from Stephen Shennan (Reference Shennan2007, 220) where it is claimed that postprocessualism seems to have become ‘mild and normal’ in recent years and thus is now the archaeology of everyone. I believe this to be an unfair outlook given that Shennan continues, in the same text, to say, ‘In archaeology . . . the theory wars of the 1980s and 90s have at the very least diminished considerably in intensity and there is a renewed concern with the process of doing archaeology’ (Shennan Reference Shennan2007, 220). Furthermore, Shennan's dismissal of postprocessualism is even more evident in his Genes, memes, and human history (Reference Shennan2002, 9), where he argues that postprocessualism failed to be the ethnographic analysis of a ‘present’ that is long gone. The impact that postprocessualism wrought in archaeology is often misunderstood: it is commonly seen as a paradigmatic revolution in the Kuhnian sense but it should be seen more as simply as a ‘mild and normal’ evolution of archaeology.

Just as the culture–history and processual straw men did not truly exist, the postprocessual straw man also does not exist. This does not mean that archaeological critique is not a critique of something; what it does mean, however, is that the big theoretical movements of the last century are best seen in hindsight as additions to archaeological practice and interpretation rather than as substitutions. Imputing more importance to postprocessualism than it actually held is to convey erroneously the idea that archaeology is mandated by dogmatic paradigms (Kuhn Reference Kuhn1996), while it is more reasonable to believe that archaeology undergoes continuous revisionary changes in an undramatic way (Toulmin Reference Toulmin, Lakatos and Musgrave1970, 46). Granted, some figures and approaches in archaeology did hold considerable influence in the past, but claiming that they were ‘hegemonic’ is pure rhetorical exaggeration. Moreover, supplanting an influential movement merely because it is influential does not seem a sustainable path for archaeology. Just as an example, the critique titled ‘tyranny of the text’ (Olsen 2010, 56) came a mere six years after the ‘tyranny of the method’ (Thomas Reference Thomas2004, 55). Following this tradition, the ‘tyranny of the thing’ is almost overdue.

If it is not broken, do not fix it

This seems the hardest lesson of all. It is hard because we instinctively want to make archaeology better but we fail to recognize that it is already getting better at a solid rate. The rate of change is more than adequate, and trying to keep up with every fad that shows up is obviously not tenable. History, for instance, is a model of slow but assured improvement. In history we see various influences, like Ginzburg's microhistory (Reference Ginzburg1993), as additions rather than paradigmatic revolutions, and these additions are generally accepted in the discipline after some critical tempering. Even the postmodern critique of history, which was supposed to revolutionize how history was to be practised, barely managed to have any impact except angering some historians and ultimately filtering out some unwanted naive empiricism.

Furthermore, archaeology seems to have lost a good part of its critical edge. The inceptions of processualism and postprocessualism were shortly followed by insightful criticism, yet today the various ideas that have cluttered the journals and books seem to be readily accepted or ignored with little to no serious critique. What seems to matter nowadays is novelty – or at least the illusion of novelty – but not the improvement of old ideas. Are hermeneutics and middle-range theory completely off the table? Is there no chance to look into past approaches and theories and see where they can be improved? It seems awfully myopic of archaeological theorists, famed for looking into the long-lost past, to completely ignore ideas that were credible a mere 20 to 30 years ago. Moreover, it seems impossible to publish anything regarding archaeological hermeneutics or middle-range theory without derisive comments on how outdated it is, while in philosophy, for instance, ideas pertaining to Aristotelian or scholastic philosophy are constantly debated and discussed, because unlike archaeological theorists, philosophers seem to be able to recognize the importance of past thinkers for their current work.

It might seem hypocritical of me to claim that archaeology needs little change while presenting a laundry list of issues within archaeology. I guess what I am trying to convey is that archaeology itself needs little to no change; what does need to change is the attitude that most archaeological theorists have in relation to archaeology. Archaeology has become a fully grown adult who leads a modest and fulfilling life, while archaeological theorists behave like condescending parents who believe they know better. Just like overbearing parents who try to force their friends and children into whatever new fad diet is around, archaeological theorists are trying to force archaeology into a new fad philosophy or theory, and just as new fad diets are eventually proven to be inadequate, so too will the new philosophies and theories be proven to be inadequate.

In closing, archaeology does not need any more pseudo-revolutions. Archaeology is not a building that requires constant demolition and reconstruction. Not only do many archaeological theorists want reconstruction, they tend to want archaeology reconstructed into some gaudy exotic piece of architecture. I would rather believe that archaeology is a garden: it requires maintenance like removing of weeds and trimming of hedges, and sometimes it requires something new to be planted. It is not the individual plants that grant archaeology its identity but the combination of plants and flowers as a whole, and in this garden not all the ambitious plans that are currently in the works are going to survive. Ultimately, what archaeology really needs is just good ol’ fashioned modesty, cohesion and acceptance, because it is only through these virtues that the garden will truly thrive.