Post-processual archaeology

Post-processual archaeology, which is sometimes alternately referred to as the interpretative archaeologies by its adherents, is a movement in archaeological theory that emphasizes the subjectivity of archaeological interpretations. Despite having a vague series of similarities, post-processualism consists of 'very diverse strands of thought coalesced into a loose cluster of traditions'. Within the post-processualist movement, a wide variety of theoretical viewpoints have been embraced, including structuralism and Neo-Marxism, as have a variety of different archaeological techniques, such as phenomenology. Post-processual archaeology, which is sometimes alternately referred to as the interpretative archaeologies by its adherents, is a movement in archaeological theory that emphasizes the subjectivity of archaeological interpretations. Despite having a vague series of similarities, post-processualism consists of 'very diverse strands of thought coalesced into a loose cluster of traditions'. Within the post-processualist movement, a wide variety of theoretical viewpoints have been embraced, including structuralism and Neo-Marxism, as have a variety of different archaeological techniques, such as phenomenology. The post-processual movement originated in the United Kingdom during the late 1970s and early 1980s, pioneered by archaeologists such as Ian Hodder, Daniel Miller, Christopher Tilley and Peter Ucko, who were influenced by French Marxist anthropology, postmodernism and similar trends in sociocultural anthropology. Parallel developments soon followed in the United States. Initially post-processualism was primarily a reaction to and critique of processual archaeology, a paradigm developed in the 1960s by 'New Archaeologists' such as Lewis Binford, and which had become dominant in Anglophone archaeology by the 1970s. Post-processualism was heavily critical of a key tenet of processualism, namely its assertion that archaeological interpretations could, if the scientific method was applied, come to completely objective conclusions. In the United States, archaeologists widely see post-processualism as an accompaniment to the processual movement, while in the United Kingdom, they remain largely thought of as separate and opposing theoretical movements. In other parts of the world, post-processualism has made less of an impact on archaeological thought. The post-processualists' approach to archaeology is diametrically opposed to that of the processualists. The processualists, as positivists, believed that the scientific method should and could apply to archaeological investigation, therefore allowing archaeologists to present objective statements about past societies based upon the evidence. Post-processual archaeology, however, questioned this stance, and instead emphasized that archaeology was subjective rather than objective, and that what truth could be ascertained from the archaeological record was often relative to the viewpoint of the archaeologist responsible for unearthing and presenting the data. As the archaeologist Matthew Johnson noted, 'Postprocessualists suggest that we can never confront theory and data; instead, we see data through a cloud of theory.' Due to the fact that they believe archaeology to be inherently subjective, post-processualists argue that 'all archaeologists... whether they overtly admit it or not', always impose their own views and bias into their interpretations of the archaeological data. In many cases, they hold that this bias is political in nature. Post-processualist Daniel Miller believed that the positivist approach of the processualists, in holding that only that which could be sensed, tested and predicted was valid, only sought to produce technical knowledge that facilitated the oppression of ordinary people by elites. In a similar criticism, Miller and Chris Tilley believed that by putting forward the concept that human societies were irresistibly shaped by external influences and pressures, archaeologists were tacitly accepting social injustice. Many processualists took this further and criticised the fact that archaeologists from wealthy, western countries were studying and writing the histories of poorer nations in the second and third worlds. Ian Hodder stated that archaeologists had no right to interpret the prehistories of other ethnic or cultural groups, and that instead they should simply provide individuals from these groups with the ability to construct their own views of the past. While Hodder's viewpoint was not universally accepted among post-processualists, there was enough support for opposing racism, colonialism and professional elitism within the discipline that in 1986 the World Archaeological Congress was established. A number of post-processualists, such as Michael Shanks, Christopher Tilley and Peter Ucko, undermined 'archaeology's claims to be an authoritative source of knowledge about the past', thereby 'encourag people to question and resist all forms of authority… This position was hailed by its supporters as democratizing archaeology and purging it… of elitist pretensions'. Whereas the processualists had been firm materialists, and the culture-historical archaeologists had, by contrast, been idealists, the post-processualists argued that past societies should be interpreted through both materialist and idealist ideas. As Johnson noted, 'Many postprocessualists claim that we should reject the whole opposition between material and ideal in the first place.' While recognizing that past societies would have interpreted the world around them in a partially materialistic way, the post-processualists argue that many historic societies have also placed a great emphasis on ideology (which included religion) in both interpreting their world and influencing their behaviour. Examples of this can be seen in the work of Bernard Knapp, who examined how the social elite manipulated ideology to maintain their political and economic control, and of Mike Parker Pearson, who asserted that tools were just as much a product of ideology as were a crown or a law code. Using an example to explain this belief in materialist-idealist unity, the archaeologist Matthew Johnson looked at the idea of landscape among past societies. He argued that: Many, although not all post-processualists have adhered to the theory of structuralism in understanding historical societies. Structuralism itself was a theory developed by the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009), and held to the idea that 'cultural patterns need not be caused by anything outside themselves… underlying every culture was a deep structure, or essence, governed by its own laws, that people were unaware of but which ensured regularities in the cultural productions that emanate from it.' At the centre of his structuralist theory, Lévi-Strauss held that 'all human thought was governed by conceptual dichotomies, or bilateral oppositions, such as culture/nature, male/female, day/night, and life/death. He believed that the principle of oppositions was a universal characteristic inherent in the human brain, but that each culture was based on a unique selection of oppositions'. This structuralist approach was first taken from anthropology and applied into forms of archaeology by the French archaeologist André Leroi-Gourhan (1911–1986), who used it to interpret prehistoric symbols in his 1964 work, Les Religions de Préhistoire.