At the beginning of the twenty-first century, we can profitably define four broad kinds of archaeological research based upon their philosophical foundations and the implicit and explicit goals stated by their practitioners. These kinds of archaeology, ranging from the least to the most scientific: are (1) critical theory, (2) hermeneutic or interpretative archaeology, (3) his-toricist archaeology, and (4) scientific archaeology. In short, contemporary critical theorists seek to create narratives of the past consistent with broad moral and political principles and to examine the discipline of archaeology itself as a constructed social practice. Hermeneutic or interpretative archaeology seeks to read multiple meanings into the archaeological record. Historicist archaeology seeks to explain the archaeological record of objects and archaeological contexts in space and time. Scientific archaeology seeks to subsume the empirical archaeological record into broader principles of human behavior. Each of these kinds of archaeology begins with different logical principles and assumptions. For each kind of archaeology, ‘explanation’ has different meanings, if any meaning at all. Even more complex, many archaeologists adopt the principles of two or more of these intellectual traditions simultaneously as they do their work.
Idealist Philosophical Traditions
Critical archaeology Critical theory practitioners stand at the end of one continuum in the philosophy of social science. Generally antagonistic to modern philosophies of science (logical positivism and empiricism), the core goal of critical theory is not to define what is in the archaeological record, but rather define: (1) what the archaeological record ought to teach us about the past and (2) to deconstruct archaeology as a power-infused social activity and rectify what they see as past errors in the way archaeology has been practiced. Critical theorists begin with the assumption that all knowledge is socially constructed, a tradition drawn largely from philosophical idealism. Furthermore, in this tradition, no socially constructed knowledge base is better or worse than any other by any a priori criteria. As such, critical theorists in archaeology seek explanation of the past in terms of their implications for social action in the present. Explanation, or more appropriately stated, providing meaning to the archaeological record and to the act of explanation itself, is subsumed under broad social, political, cultural precepts, and/or moral mandates. As Hodder and Hutson note, such approaches interpret ‘‘. . . past cultural meanings in relation to such issues as power and domination, history and gender’’.
Critical archaeology is essentially a morally based social and political activity in the sense described by Scheper-Hughes (1995) for anthropology in general. In this tradition, any pretext of logical realism (whether in the positivist sense used by Salmon (1982:162) or in the postpositivist sense of Gibbon (1989:142-172); see Wylie (2003)) or its related philosophical positions of materialism, instrumentalism, empiricism, and so forth, is considered inappropriate for archaeological interpretation. Any scientific epistemology assumes that a real and knowable world exists apart from the human observers - that is, what scientists study is independent of the analytical process and has an independent ontological status with its own a priori properties. Scientific epistemologies assume that data and history are real, and that the process of interpretation, in theory (if not necessarily in practice), can be morally neutral. Scientific philosophies eschew the metaphysical. Extreme logical positivism even denied the existence of abstract truths not verifiable by the human senses, although most archaeological scientists today hold much more moderate views as described below.
Archaeologists working in this critical theory tradition would ideally expect the interpretation of those power relationships to contribute to some kind of broader social activity that weakens asymmetrical relationships of power in contemporary society. Ironically, while maintaining a hyper-relativistic stance as an ideal, interpretations of the past that conform to morally sound principles of social justice are usually considered superior to those that are perceived to reinforce asymmetrical power relationships in contemporary society. Insofar as explanation exists in this tradition, it is intimately linked to the degree to which an interpretation can inspire or effect social and political action. Given that all interpretations are valid, one is not only free to choose the most socially correct one, one is in a sense obligated to choose the most moral interpretation.
An archaeologist working in the critical theory tradition who discusses, say, an early Greek theatre, a Southwestern US kiva, or Peruvian sunken court would seek to define the power relationships represented by that architecture in the material record. These public constructions are interpreted as reinforcing ideologies of power, or, conversely, may be seen as means by which the majority of people resist such social power. As a critique of existing archaeological practice, critical theorists have provided useful insights into how archaeologists conduct research. It has been far less successful as a positive research framework, given its general rejection of explanation as a feasible or desirable goal.
Hermeneutic or interpretative archaeology Hermeneutic or interpretative archaeology draws off many of the principles of critical theory, most crucially the assumption that all knowledge is socially constructed. They likewise share a general rejection of scientific determinism or any variant of logical positivism or empiricism. Hermeneutics is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) as ‘‘the art or science of interpretation. . . Beginning at least with the philosopher Collingwood (with strong ties to Hegel and Kant), hermeneutic approaches to history and culture generally reject scientific epistemologies.
As culturally constituted and irreducible, human behavior cannot be explained with reference to external factors such as the environment, technology, and so forth in hermeneutic archaeology. As with critical archaeology, hermeneutic archaeology also rejects any simple or direct relationship between material culture and human behavior. As hermeneutic practitioners would put it, ‘‘culture creates objects and objects create culture’’ in a recursive and complex relationship not reducible to simple linear propositions. Avidly antipositivistic, knowledge is not cumulative, but constantly reformulated. Knowledge that reinforces asymmetrical power relations is consciously resisted (or decentered) as an explicit goal. In this tradition, culture and the archaeological record are ambiguous cultural texts to be ‘read’ - interpreted and reinterpreted - not explained in any scientific sense. The ‘texts’ are highly affected by the readers’ social, political, and cultural biases; for many hermeneutic archaeologists, the context in which the archaeological record is read is as important as data themselves. Therefore, an archaeologist working in this tradition who encounters an early Greek theatre, a Southwestern US kiva, or Peruvian sunken court would seek to create a narrative of meaning that is represented in the material record. That meaning can be different for different interpreters, and there is no hierarchy of these interpretations. What is meaningful from one perspective is as equally valid as any other perspective. Ambiguity and imprecision, considered anathema by historicist and scientific archaeologists, are essential components of hermeneutic archaeology. It is essential precisely because such language evokes different meanings from different people, a process that enriches the narrative.
While usually denying it, most practitioners of hermeneutic and critical archaeology implicitly rely heavily upon some form of philosophical idealism. A prominent example is Hodder and Hutson (2003:4), who, in describing the epistemological foundations of interpretative archaeology, note that cultural behavior is not reducible to broader generalizations because ‘‘culture is meaningfully constituted’’ (i. e., not an independent phenomenon apart from the observer) and ‘‘cultural relationships are not caused by anything else outside themselves. They just are’’. This statement, of course, betrays a classic idealist stance vis-?i-vis culture and history. It must be pointed out that some readings of this tradition suggest that external and noncultural factors constrain the production of cultural meaning and therefore may result in some broad cross-cultural similarities, a process that scientific archaeologists would call convergent evolution. However, as the above quote demonstrates, hermeneutic archaeology is firmly rooted in idealist epistemologies of philosophy not amenable to any kind of reductionist statement or empirical verification/ falsification procedure.
Combined, critical and hermeneutic archaeology constitute a large part of what is known as ‘postpro-cessual’ archaeology in Anglo-American traditions (see Postprocessual Archaeology). Most objective observers now agree that postprocessualism provided a useful critique of the excesses of the new archaeology and the naive adoption of logical positivism (see Processual Archaeology). That critique gave rise to a richer approach to explaining the past with variables beyond technology, demography, and subsistence. In other influential intellectual traditions, particularly those in Spain and Latin America, the term ‘social archaeology’ is usually associated with these and/or some variant of Marxist or structural Marxist approaches (see Social Theory; Marxist Archaeology). Postproces-sual archaeology constitutes a rich and diverse set of approaches that is not readily definable. Some selfdescribed postprocessualists actually work within empiricist epistemologies as described below, but reject the traditional ‘processual’ archaeological focus on the strictly material. In this sense, they are ‘post’-processual only insofar that they test models of cultural process that privilege ideology, gender, power, and other variables traditionally considered epiphenomenal by the New Archaeology. However, all critical and hermeneutic archaeologies are post-processual, and all are based upon the general rejection of scientific philosophies and the implicit adoption of philosophical idealism in one guise or the other. Explanation and causation in such traditions is not an attainable goal. Creating multiple meaning of the past while critiquing the practice of archaeology is the central goal.
Empiricist Philosophical Positions
Historicist archaeology Historicist archaeology seeks to precisely define objects and events in the archaeological record in space and time. The term ‘historicist’ is used to differentiate this school from ‘historical’ archaeology. The latter is a subdiscipline of archaeology focusing on time periods that have contemporary textual information (see Historical Archaeology: As a Discipline). Historical archaeology can be conducted in any one of the four traditions described here (see Historical Archaeology: Methods). The former, described in this article, refers to a particular approach in archaeology that has its own epistemological principles.
Scholars working within this historicist tradition generally accept key principles of scientific ontology and epistemology, particularly the assumption of a real, independent, and knowable universe. They combine these philosophical assumptions with inductive methodologies to reconstruct the archaeological record. Inductive methodologies begin with the existing database and confine explanation to within what can be known about the empirical record. Historicist archaeology shares many of the philosophical principles of scientific archaeology, but eschews the subsuming of particular historical events into broader theoretical principles.
Explanation in this tradition centers on the ability to locate the remains in or on the ground in either a known historical sequence as derived from independent data sets such as texts, or within existing archaeological data sets. Successful explanation is based upon the degree to which the interpretation generally conforms and adds to previously established knowledge. Unlike scientific approaches, his-toricist archaeology sees the past as contingent, developing out of earlier historical moments in a particular cultural sequence. It is not, in their view, subsumable to larger processes. Given this assumption, historicists seek to explain particular historical phenomena through a rigid methodology of empirical testing and verification.
For instance, the discovery in 1974 of the tomb of the Chinese Emperor Qin Shihuangdi represents a classic instance of explanation in this tradition. The tomb had been described in texts, the dates were known to the precise year, and the archaeological data confirmed and expanded the empirical knowledge of this important culture. Prior to archaeological research, the tomb was not explained but was merely part of a large mound that was assumed to be archaeological. After the discovery of terra cotta figures and after problem-oriented research was conducted at the site, the archaeologists were able to define who built the tomb, when it was built, when it was abandoned, and even in some cases which individuals were represented by the terra cotta figures. From an histori-cist perspective, explanation was very successful because the tomb, the buildings, and the associated objects were precisely located in space and time; empirical knowledge was increased, the canon of historical knowledge about this dynasty was expanded, and a richer history was created.
Explanation in this tradition only begins at this level; eventually more data (either empirical data derived from additional field work or data derived from new analysis of existing data sets) should ideally provide the archaeologist with a richer understanding of the history of the object or social phenomena.
Historicist archaeology deals with questions such as: why did Cahokia collapse, what was the origin of divine kingship among the Maya, what motivated Akkadian expansion, did humans or climate kill off the late Pleistocene megafauna in the Americas, who was buried in this tomb, and so on? In this sense, the historical tradition again breaks with critical and hermeneutic approaches in seeing knowledge as cumulative. While interpretations may be refined, revised, and/or discarded, the collection of new empirical knowledge adds to the ever-increasing canon of historical data in any particular cultural area. It is in this fundamentally empiricist activity that explanation is located in historicist archaeology.
To continue with our example, an archaeologist working in the historicist tradition who discovers an early Greek theater, a kiva, or Peruvian sunken court would seek to assess the time and culture within which that architecture was constructed. The degree to which these objects can be associated with known historical events and even individuals, as with the Qin Shihuangdi tomb, is the major criterion of explanatory success. The same applies to any and all sorts of objects and the contexts within which those objects are found. As empirical knowledge accumulates, an increasingly richer historical narrative of past societies can be constructed. Explanation is not precisely linear, since new data will alter interpretations. However, there is general sense borrowed from ‘soft’ neopositivist assumptions that the addition of new data from any particular area will enhance the ability of the archaeologist to explain the cultural historical record in any particular place and time.
Scientific archaeology Scientific archaeology accepts many of the principles of historicist archaeology but goes further in that the primary goal is to subsume the archaeological record into broader patterns of human behavior in space and time. Scientific archaeology is viewed by its practitioners as a branch of comparative behavioral and social science. As such, it is most closely associated with ‘explanation’ and ‘causality’, as generally understood in the philosophy of science.
Contemporary scientific archaeology is an outgrowth of the New Archaeology popular in the 1960s and 1970s. The philosophical standards of this perspective can be found in the book Explanation in Archaeology by P. Watson, S. Le Blanc, and C. Redman (1971). The New Archaeology explicitly borrowed from the logical positivism and extreme empiricism of the Vienna School and its later practitioners. When the critique of logical positivism among philosophers of science in the 1950s and 1960s gained ground later in archaeology, the New
Archaeology modified its epistemological underpinnings. In particular, modifications by the work of the philosopher Hempel (in particular, the recognition of ‘statistical’ laws) and, to a lesser extent, the influence of Popper, contributed to a reformulation that served as the philosophical basis of the next generation of scientific archaeology that developed out of the New Archaeology.
Eliminating some of the excesses of the extreme empiricism of logical positivism and adopting more ‘elastic’ criteria of verification, scientific archaeology has shifted its focus since the 1980s. It is a safe generalization to say that the New Archaeology was largely associated with Hempelian deductive-nomological explanation, while contemporary scientific archaeology is more associated with Popperian falsification epistemologies and instrumentalist philosophies of science. Instrumentalist assumptions reject the notion that absolute truth can be known and instead rely on ‘best fit’ models, as described below.
Likewise, unlike much of the New Archaeology, contemporary scientific archaeology assumes that there is usually no direct relationship between material culture and behavior; both natural and cultural processes work to alter the archaeological record in space and time. Most contemporary scientific archaeologists also accept the fact that cultural biases affect both the interpretation and the analytical categories used to study the archaeological record. However, since science is viewed as a replicable, rule-bound social activity and not a reflective and subjective activity as in idealist traditions, scientific archaeology assumes that these biases can be made explicit and therefore controlled.
Like the New Archaeology, contemporary scientific archaeology relies heavily on empiricist and realist assumptions about the structure of the natural and social world as independent and knowable, while adopting a much stronger reliance on propositions derived from existing theoretical knowledge. Again, the influence of the post-Vienna School empiricists is evident here. Contemporary scientific archaeology also accepts the methodological precept of parsimony, best defined by the OED as ‘‘the logical principle that no more causes or forces should be assumed than are necessary to account for the facts’’.
Processual archaeology used to be synonymous with the New Archaeology. Now it is simply another term for scientific archaeology. While this school is not formally named, it is a type of archaeology that encompasses a number of frameworks that evolved from the New Archaeology. The key goal of the discipline today is to understand the general processes or underlying logic of human cultural evolution in the same way that evolutionary biologists construct generalizing principles to understand the origin and evolution of the world’s plants and animals. Within evolutionary biology, there is a wide range of theoretical approaches. Within contemporary scientific archaeology, there is an equally broad range of approaches. Some approaches privilege economics, some privilege technology, some ideology, ecology, polity, or demography, and most combine these factors into complex, multivariate explanations. All scientific approaches share, by logical necessity, reductionist assumptions and seek empirical confirmation or rejection in one form or another. They are therefore diametrically opposite to hermeneutic and critical archaeologies.
Virtually all contemporary scientific neoevolutionary theory rejects the universalizing and totalizing features of early unilineal or, to a lesser extent, multilineal cultural evolutionary theory. Universalizing is understood to mean that a particular theory covers all cultural phenomena in all places and all times. Totalizing refers to the assumptions of nineteenth century evolutionary theory that saw all aspects of cultures as evolving. Instead, contemporary neoevolutionary cultural theory recognizes distinct evolutionary pathways in different environmental and social circumstances, and, except for doctrinaire (and now largely marginal) Darwinian archaeology, it isolates only certain aspects of culture that are subject to selection.
In this light, concepts such as typologies, chief-doms, states, and so forth are not assumed to be inherent stages through which societies must evolve. Such a position, in fact, represents a discredited preDarwinian (read Spencerian or Lamarkian type of philosophical idealism) kind of evolutionary process that has little theoretical or empirical foundation in contemporary scientific archaeology. Rather, neoevolutionary theory in contemporary scientific archaeology is more faithful to Darwinian evolutionary principles of descent with modification with some kind of selective mechanism providing the means by which societies develop. Terms such as ‘chiefdom’ and ‘state’, as Flannery has consistently pointed out for two decades, are merely heuristic categories that help sort out a very complex empirical reality. A chiefdom has an ontological status similar to the category of ‘reptile’ or ‘mammal’ in evolutionary biology. In the same way that there is no inherent process by which a reptile must evolve into a mammal, there is no inherent process by which a chiefdom must necessarily evolve into a state. However, being able to distinguish mammals from reptiles allows palaeontologists to reconstruct evolutionary sequences and develop general principles of evolution better than if no such categories existed; the analogy holds for scientific archaeology as well.
In this sense, explanation in contemporary scientific archaeology differs from the New Archaeology in several critical ways. At the epistemological level, the most important is the recognition that social scientific ‘laws’ do not exist as immutable phenomena, even if a real world exists apart from our observations of it - this is a clear effect of the influence of Popperian philosophies of science in the discipline. The limitations of our sensory capacities necessarily (in a logical sense) make it impossible to discover immutable laws. Rather, scientific theories are the best descriptions of the observed archaeological record, as deduced by patterns of behavior seen in ethnographic or historical peoples. Likewise, a criterion of utility (or ‘philosophical instrumentalism’ in some discussions) is the basis by which theories are judged; more simply put, whatever theory explains the most phenomena in the most parsimonious way at a particular moment is considered better than other theories. Again, this is a position unequivocally derived from the philosophies of Popper as he modified logical positivism.
As mentioned above, the heuristic categories used by processual archaeologists, such as ‘chiefdom’, provide a means of comparing societies across space and time. This analytical technique is the cornerstone of scientific archaeology. Put another way, comparative analysis is the fundamental logic by which general principles can be derived from the archaeological record. In a number of cases around the world, chief-doms indeed evolved into states. But the reality is that the vast majority of chiefdoms did not evolve into states, and in some cases of secondary state formation, states developed out of socio-political organizations that were not chiefdoms at all. The same can be said for virtually any analytical category utilized by scientific archaeologists. However, in those rare instances where a clear pattern emerges where structurally similar societies in independent geographical areas followed similar patterns of development, explanation in a classic scientific sense is demanded. In fact, the cornerstone of contemporary scientific archaeology rests on the numerous observations that patterns in the historical and archaeological record occur across space and time. Given this empirical reality, some kind of reductionism is logically inescapable and necessary for scientific archaeology.
World History
