Strength in Weakness

Abstract

Gavin Lucas and Christopher Witmore have written a thoughtful, engaging and well argued article. As with their previous work, their arguments encourage the reader to think about the nature and practice of archaeology in new ways. They raise questions about how we practice archaeology that are quite simple but quite profound. In this brief response, I want to respectfully differ over two aspects of their overall thesis. I am not persuaded that there is, or has been, a decisive move away from what Lucas and Witmore term paradigmatic thought and strong theory. First, as they point out, in some circles strong theory is stronger than ever: they mention Kristiansen and others, and could have pointed to Kintigh et al. (2014), which was a quite explicit attempt to impose a research agenda on the discipline, and to Kohler et al. (2017). The co-existence of stronger-than-strong theory of this kind with the ‘weaker’ approaches and sensibilities advocated by Lucas and Witmore might suggest not a shift from one mode to another, but rather a fragmentation in archaeological thinking and practice. Alternatively, it might suggest that we are mistaken in seeing strong theory and weak theory as competing. I suggest that we might see strong and weak theory instead as mutually interdependent. Weak theory is only possible, can only carve out an intellectual space for itself, within a wider paradigm that is broadly post-positivist and dare I say it postmodern. Such a comment may sound out-of-date but I think it still retains validity. I suggest that strong theory may not be overtly articulated within the sort of account offered by Lucas and Witmore but it is very much present nevertheless. Consider the very practical question of how it is that Witmore came to be doing archaeological research in Napflion in the first place. To obtain the travel and project funds, he must have written a formal proposal complete with research design. Explicitly or implicitly, such documents tend to be framed around Big Questions and to lay out a formal structure of archaeological research in which the collection of evidence is brought to bear on moreor-less paradigmatic questions. I have never seen or refereed a research proposal that foregrounded a process of ‘slow archaeology’ or which proposed the sort of archaeological process presented by Lucas and Witmore. I am pointing here not just towards the interdependence of strong and weak theory, but also towards a more basic disconnect between what archaeologists say they do and what they actually do. Archaeologists (some? many?) do, in practice, spend much of their time engaging in the sort of slow archaeology described and dissected in the Napflion and pottery analysis vignettes. This kind of practice, however, is systematically written out of most theoretical accounts. It is a major achievement of constructivist approaches to have written it back in. I have a second respectful difference, which is the degree to which a shift to weak theory is dependent on an object-oriented