We thank the four commentators – Åsa Berggren, Barbara Helwing, Barbara Mills, and Allan Maca – for their thoughtfully critical comments and cannot help but feel encouraged by the passion displayed in their comments. To an extent underrealized in our initial formulation, the recording and interpretation of stratigraphy forms the jugular vein of archaeological practice. Although accused by some of the commentators of not offering anything new, creating a straw man, or ignoring artefacts, we note that our discussion of social stratigraphy encouraged reflexivity about archaeological practice in all four commentaries. Our initial pulling together of social practices that might be expressed in patterns of depositing and cutting also sparked extremely productive and creative dialogue regarding the documentation and interpretation of stratigraphy, a virtual (and highly successful) simulation that employed our proposed ‘toolkit’, and worrisome questions regarding the lack of fit between social theory and archaeological technique within the Americanist tradition. We address these topics, particularly in light of commentators' demonstration of the importance of reflexive practices within archaeology.
In relating variable success in implementing digital diaries in which reflexive discussions of stratigraphic interpretation were logged, Åsa Berggren identifies an important and widely appreciated challenge to the implementation of an explicitly interpretive loop in the hermeneutical cycle of documentation and understanding of built stratigraphic sequences, the latter in light of social theory. She relates that excavators in Malmö, Sweden, were far more willing to reflect on stratigraphic interpretation when excavating sites with relatively simple layers but resorted to diary entries of thick description when confronted with the stratigraphic complexity of medieval sites. The challenges of adequately documenting sequence and physical matrix at locales of constructed space often push consideration of the meaning of layers and cuts – and the practices that produced those layers and cuts – into the background. We applaud and second the suggestion by Berggren to ‘frontload’ the documentation process with interpretive categories for recorded elements of stratigraphy. The process and interpretation schema offered in figure 3 might provide a starting point for such a coding, but as we, and discussants, emphasize, these entries are by no means exhaustive or relevant to all locations. Corollary discussion of interpretive decision-making by excavators, as Berggren indicates, forms a vital part of this method.
Barbara Mills is vested in the notion that social stratigraphy is social memory (whether habitual or explicitly commemorative) but we reiterate that other interpretations – forgetting, cleansing, renewing or dominating – often are equally plausible and should not be overlooked in favour of the flavour of the day. Also, superimposed use of the same locale does not rule out the notion that two episodes may not be relational or linked by an arc of social memory. Nonrelated reuse of place (we use the term ‘palimpsest creation’) needs to be considered in stratigraphic interpretation. In this regard, several commentators called for greater attention to the distinction between routinized and commemorative practices in the making of stratigraphic sequence and the parallel need for interpretive concepts with social resonance on a local scale. We are well aware of the tension between local practice and transnational social theory and welcome the proliferation of interpretive schemas with local relevance. This does not mean, as Helwing concludes, that resolution of stratigraphy-making techniques locally will have only negligible impact on historical knowledge in general. The two exist in relational balance.
Mills voices objection to our privileging of strata over objects, but as we tried to convey in our short historiography of stratigraphic interpretation, it is the fascination with objects that has dominated stratigraphic method to the detriment of knowledge advancement regarding techniques of depositing and cutting. We propose that layers and cuts receive as much attention as artefacts and not that artefacts receive less. Attention to the interpretation of artefact deposition is integral to the understanding of soil or matrix layering and cutting. We agree with Mills that stratigraphic sequence can be conceptualized productively as ‘genealogies of practice’, a term that may be interchangeable with ‘processes’ as we employ it in figure 3.
Many thanks, Barbara Helwing, for supplying additional citations of those working on issues of stratigraphic interpretation outside of the ‘anglophone’ world, but note that we did not claim to present a comprehensive but rather an abstracted review of how thinking about stratigraphy has changed within our discipline. The goal of our discussion is not to stake a claim on social stratigraphy but rather to gather together disparate ontological threads of a method in order to further archaeological interpretation. The simulated application – a virtual tour de force – by Helwing of concepts discussed in this paper appears to demonstrate the efficacy of a social-stratigraphy approach. Her application of this interpretive method to archaeological excavation suggests, furthermore, that reflexive ethnography of stratigraphy-making decisions by archaeologists is a fertile field of inquiry and likely a critical strut of increased transparency and sophistication in stratigraphic interpretation.
Allan Maca welcomes the debate that may be generated from our essay and offers three additional stratigraphy-related debates from Mesoamerica. The phantom of Walter Taylor – who never shied from contestation – haunts his discussion. Maca too applies concepts from the interpretive ‘toolkit’ of a social stratigraphy – erasure, forgetting – to trace disciplinary stratigraphies that pivot on Taylor's influence and its alleged masking. Maca is thinking about the polemics of stratigraphic interpretation in extremely social terms. The debate surrounding the function and construction date of a Late Classic Maya structure from Copán, Honduras – as a council house (popol naah) or a shrine dedicated to an assemblage of deities – falls within the broader purview of interpretive methods. But Maca also alludes to deep challenges to a social stratigraphy that hinge upon archaeological technique, from methods employed to reckon with stratigraphy at the trowel's edge to analytic frameworks for handling the durational dimension of stratigraphy. Archaeological technique is foundational to the interpretive enterprise of archaeology; within Mesoamerica, the uneasy fit between archaeological technique and social theory as described by Maca can be seen as providing an opening for growth that could be facilitated by reflexive recording techniques that would reposition debate within the recording process itself rather than introduce it as acrimonious post-publication discourse.
In summary, we are pleased by the request of the commentators for more, richly textured examples of social stratigraphy from K'axob, Çatalhöyük, and elsewhere; we look forward to satisfying that desire in forthcoming publications.
