Writing the Past. Knowledge and Literary Production in Archaeology

Abstract

Around the middle of the last century a number of archaeological practices were described as being ‘empiricist’. This description was applied to those practices that appeared to employ the assumption that because material residues recorded, and thus represented, the processes that were involved in their formation, then by describing those materials their formation processes were also described, and thus the ‘past’ was revealed. This view was challenged by arguing that archaeology should do more than simply describe the formation of the particular things that had existed in the past, and seek instead to explain, in more general terms, the reasons why certain assemblages of things had come about. The move was therefore one that took archaeology from the study of the particular influences to explanations formulated in terms of general processes. The emphasis of this kind new of archaeology was towards explaining ‘culture change’, in which it was assumed that an explanation should specify the causes for the changes that had occurred amongst the different kinds of cultural systems. It was these systems that were taken to be represented by archaeological assemblages of things. Throughout this debate the issue that tended to be forgotten was the ways that the protagonists were using language. This was not a concern with the unknown languages of the past, but the present-day languages by which knowledge claims were being sustained and communicated. This issue came down to the ways that the relationships between things were being expressed in words. Clearly general causes are unlikely to be expressed as if they were self-evident. It was therefore accepted that causes needed to be thought about and to be modelled ‘theoretically’, and, by this means, they also needed to be evaluated. Archaeological theorists dismissed any lingering desire for an empiricist reading of the material by means of the languages that they used, and their theoretical modelling sought to identify the general reasons why certain historical processes might have existed. For example, variability in artefact assemblages could now be described as variability in tool kits, a variability that had been designed for the different tasks demanded by the processes of environmental adaptation, rather than that same variability being treated as if it had resulted from an ethnically transmitted tradition of artefact production. A theoretically informed archaeology was thus developed in the latter half of the twentieth century. Because the theoretical modelling of formation processes assumed that the past had been structured by a more limited set of processes than might have been implied by the diversity of its material remains, then these structuring processes were described in the relatively abstract languages of theory. Archaeology developed the skills to record the particular nature of the material diversity of the past by the use of a traditional ‘cultural’ labelling, whilst at the same time developing the analytical languages that could describe the more general processes that were believed to have brought about that diversity. It is the relationship between the two traditions of languageuse, widely expressed in traditions of archaeological writing, that Gavin Lucas seeks to explore in this book. Lucas suggests that archaeologists do in fact spend most of their working lives writing (and reading), and that what they write (and what they read, and what they copy) concerns the way that they are able to communicate their understandings of the links between the material diversity they recover today, and the general processes that they believe had once operated in the past. This means that written styles must exist that carry the work of description into the work of interpretation and explanation. The written styles of explanation presumably carry within them certain theoretical prejudices that claim to