Reviews
056
Reading the Past: Current Approaches to Interpretation in Archaeology
Ian Hodder
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986; second edition, 1999) 221 pp., $22.95
When I began college in Greece in 1987, Ian Hodder’s Reading the Past had been in bookstores for about a year. I did not read it until 1990, and even then I was not yet ready for it and failed to understand its importance or the impact it would have on archaeology.
Back then, most of my professors claimed that archaeology was not an autonomous discipline. Rather, it was history’s crutch. Archaeology’s aim was to provide examples of things referred to in the historical record and to test the accuracy of that record. For this reason, my training included many lists of kings and generals, architectural styles and ceramic typologies. It was all interesting and beautiful, but not terribly exciting. The idea of archaeology as history’s “spell-checker” frustrated me.
Then I took a course called “Introduction to Prehistory,” which fundamentally changed the way I thought about archaeology and its function. “Archaeology,” the professor said, “is not only the footprints of the cat on the cement—how deep or wide they are. Archaeology is what made the cat walk on the fresh cement. Did somebody kick her or offer her food? Did a dog chase her, or did she run after a mouse?” Thus I was introduced to what was called New Archaeology, which had shifted the focus from “what” and “who” to “how” and “why.”
Developed in the United States, this view of archaeology became widely known in the 1960s and 1970s through the writings of Lewis R. Binford. Unlike the old archaeology, New Archaeology was affiliated with anthropology rather than history. In anthropology we study others. In the United States, where Euro-Americans were studying the Native American past, anthropology seemed to be an appropriate model for archaeology. In Europe, where we study our past, we feel that we are recovering our own history.
This difference may look like a bit of academic squabbling, but it is much more than that. Breaking with traditional descriptive and particularistic approaches to the past, Binford argued that what we find in our excavations may now be the static remnants of the past, but they were once parts of active processes. It is this active past that we seek when we study our material, he claimed. Describing ancient people’s sculptures and villages is not 057enough. Rather, we need to know how they made them. Why did they make them in this way and not in another? How did they organize their lives in their villages? What would ever make them develop different forms of art or adopt new lifestyles? Those are the interesting questions.
To be able to provide insights into such a past, New Archaeology looked for methodological help in the hard sciences and for theoretical support in cultural anthropology. A variety of new disciplines flourished, such as zooarchaeology (the study of animal remains) and paleoethnobotany (the study of plants used by ancient peoples). It became standard practice in excavations to collect not only gold and ceramics but also the fish bones and other carbonized remains left by ancient cooks. Statistics, geology, biology and chemistry became appropriate course options for archaeology majors.
Along with this methodological awareness came the belief that archaeology may be similar to the hard sciences. Just as the hard sciences look for regularities in the physical world, build models to describe it, and test their hypotheses in an attempt to discover laws, so should archaeology look for regularities in human behavior, build models and test hypotheses. Moreover, archaeologists deal with great spans of time and with populations spread out over the globe. This large-scale perspective might allow them to see patterns that historians, restricted in both time and place, would miss. Cross-cultural studies were used to observe patterns of human behavior to help archaeologists build hypotheses, which could be tested against the archaeological record. It was now possible and appropriate to ask questions on a large scale. Not “What did Alexander the Great do in the spring of 334 B.C. at the Battle of Granicus?” but “How did the advent of agriculture affect human societies?” and “What makes communities around the world develop from simple villages to complex states with kings and elaborate bureaucracies?”
This New Archaeology, also called processual archaeology, became widely accepted. It was not long, however, before some Europeans began raising theoretical objections to this American tradition, mainly in writings of Ian Hodder and his colleagues at Cambridge University. Hodder et al. questioned New Archaeology’s assumptions about human behavior and how the archaeological record should be studied and interpreted.
Through his ethnoarchaeological fieldwork, Hodder realized that material culture, which is all we archaeologists have in our hands, is not merely the Darwinian product of a culture’s adaptation to its environment. We do not do things merely to survive in our physical or social environment. Our cultural attitudes—ideas, values, aesthetic ideals, morals, religious beliefs—are to some extent expressed in the things that we make and use; they could never be deduced from, or reduced to, an environment. To understand objects, then, we must understand those who made and used them—the people and cultures behind the material evidence. To do so, we must place material culture in its specific social context, because the same object can mean different things in different places, or at different times. If meaning is context specific, however, we cannot generalize from one culture to another. Cross-cultural comparisons, New Archaeology’s main strategy for studying human behavior, are thus inappropriate for studying the past.
Hodder also observed that material culture is not simply a direct reflection of human behavior. Houses, tools, weapons and mosaics do not simply exist. They are created through the actions of individuals for various reasons. These things become part of and alter the material culture, which in turn exerts an influence on other people. The influences move in both directions, from people to things and from things to people. New Archaeology did not address this kind of complexity and particularity; it looked instead for regularities in large populations and broad tendencies, under the assumption that there are natural systems so fundamental and comprehensive that individuals are powerless to divert them. It is the system, New Archaeology claimed, that is powerful, and people adapt to it. Hodder disagreed. In his view, human beings do not just act out scripts dictated by a system. Human beings form strategies, create and adapt social roles, invent technologies, and cooperate with some people while trying to dominate others. Human beings are resourceful and capable. Of course, people do not operate in perfect freedom. They inherit various structures of thought and meaning, from the political arrangements under which they live to the languages they speak. However, people have choices, and even when they try to re-create received forms of thought and meaning, they inevitably change them and create them anew. How appropriate is it then to focus just on large-scale questions and to look only for regularities and “laws” similar to those of the hard sciences? Hodder understood, moreover, that no two people understand the world in exactly the same way. For example, my experience of America as a Greek student was very different from the experiences of my American friends. Why should we try to see just one past if, in a sense, there are so many presents?
Finally, Hodder forced us to think about and address the role that present conditions play in our attempts to understand and explain the world and its past. The fact that our methodologies are sophisticated does not guarantee that our explanations are objective. We can no longer present the use of scientific techniques as proof of objectivity. Archaeology today is what it is in each country because of what has been found. To a large extent, what has been found is what was looked for—and, to complicate matters further, what has been found affects where and how we look, concentrating on certain periods or regions, say, or on wealthier or more visible archaeological sites. In archaeology, as in other disciplines, the present and the past are in a dialectical relationship, which is always in motion and should always be consciously acknowledged.
In other words, Ian Hodder, 058through his writings, initiated the second fundamental change in archaeology in the last three decades. New Archaeology urged us to see an active past and to ask “how” and “why.” Hodder urged us to humanize that active past and made us realize that without asking “who” we cannot get a meaningful “why.” People with habits and attitudes, likes and dislikes, strategies and emotions emerged in the picture. Capable, thoughtful and resourceful people make things that are not necessarily understood when looked at from a distant, large-scale point of view.
Hodder also made us realize that what we learn about the past depends on what we ask. The questions we ask, in turn, do not exist in a pure, unsullied, objective sphere. What we ask depends on the present just as much as it depends on the past. Since our present is so varied, the way we look at the past should be equally varied, too. This is why another set of approaches has flourished in post-processual times: Now such disciplines as feminism, philosophy and literary theory are as valuable to the archaeologist as geology and biology.
Ultimately, Hodder changed how we see our past.
Reading the Past: Current Approaches to Interpretation in Archaeology
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