Archaeology and the Historical Understanding

Archaeology and the Historical Understanding

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archaeology and the historical understanding

Universitätsforschungen zur prähistorischen Archäologie Band 292 Human Development in Landscapes 14

Herausgegeben für die Graduiertenschule >Human Development in Landscapes< der Christian-Albrechts-Universität Kiel Herausgeber: Johannes Müller

In Kommission bei Verlag Dr. Rudolf Habelt GmbH, Bonn 2018

Artur Seang Ping Ribeiro

a r c h a eo logy a nd th e h i s tor i ca l u n d er s ta n d i ng

In Kommission bei Verlag Dr. Rudolf Habelt GmbH, Bonn 2018

Gedruckt mit Unterstützung der Graduiertenschule „Human Development in Landscapes“, Kiel und der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), Bonn.

Editing: Artur Ribeiro, Kiel Layout: Janine Cordts, Kiel Composition: Janine Cordts, Kiel Image editing: Janine Cordts, Kiel Cover design: Karin Winter, Kiel Printed by: druckhaus köthen GmbH & Co.KG 2018 in Kommission bei Verlag Dr. Rudolf Habelt GmbH, Bonn

ISBN 978-3-7749-4168-7

Titel auch als eBook (PDF)erhältlich unter www.habelt.de Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie. Detailliertere Informationen sind im Internet über abrufbar. © 2018 by UFG CAU Kiel and author

vo r wo rt d e r h e r a u sg e b e r

Die Reihe „Universitätsforschungen zur prähistorischen Archäologie“ soll einem in der jüngeren Vergangenheit entstandenen Bedürfnis Rechnung tragen, nämlich Examensarbeiten und andere Forschungsleistungen vornehmlich jüngerer Wissenschaftler in die Öffentlichkeit zu tragen. Die etablierten Reihen und Zeitschriften des Faches reichen längst nicht mehr aus, die vorhandenen Manuskripte aufzunehmen. Die Universitäten sind deshalb aufgerufen, Abhilfe zu schaffen. Einige von ihnen haben mit den ihnen zur Verfügung stehenden Mitteln unter zumeist tatkräftigem Handanlegen der Autoren die vorliegende Reihe begründet. Thematisch soll darin die ganze Breite des Faches vom Paläolithikum bis zur Archäologie der Neuzeit ihren Platz finden.

Ursprünglich hatten sich fünf Universitätsinstitute in Deutschland zur Herausgabe der Reihe zusammengefunden, der Kreis ist inzwischen größer geworden. Er lädt alle interessierten Professoren und Dozenten ein, als Mitherausgeber tätig zu werden und Arbeiten aus ihrem Bereich der Reihe zukommen zu lassen. Für die einzelnen Bände zeichnen jeweils die Autoren und Institute ihrer Herkunft, die im Titel deutlich gekennzeichnet sind, verantwortlich. Sie erstellen eine druckfertig gestaltete Datei (PDF). Bei gleicher Anordnung des Umschlages haben die verschiedenen beteiligten Universitäten jeweils eine spezifische Farbe. Finanzierung und Druck erfolgen entweder durch sie selbst oder durch den Verlag Dr. Rudolf Habelt GmbH, der in jedem Fall den Vertrieb der Bände sichert.

Herausgeber sind derzeit: Kurt Alt (Mainz) François Bertemes (Halle) Nikolaus Boroffka (Berlin) Peter Breunig (Frankfurt am Main) Philippe Della Casa (Zürich) Manfred K.H. Eggert (Tübingen) Clemens Eibner (Heidelberg) Frank Falkenstein (Würzburg) Ralf Gleser (Münster) Bernhard Hänsel (Berlin) Alfred Haffner (Kiel) Albert Hafner (Bern) Svend Hansen (Berlin) Ole Harck (Kiel) Joachim Henning (Frankfurt am Main) Christian Jeunesse (Strasbourg) Albrecht Jockenhövel (Münster) Tobias L. Kienlin (Köln) Rüdiger Krause (Frankfurt am Main) Klára Kuzmová (Trnava) Amei Lang (München) Andreas Lippert (Wien) Jens Lüning (Frankfurt am Main)

Joseph Maran (Heidelberg) Carola Metzner-Nebelsick (München) Johannes Müller (Kiel) Ulrich Müller (Kiel) Michael Müller-Wille (Kiel) Mária Novotná (Trnava) Bernd Päffgen (München) Diamantis Panagiotopoulos (Heidelberg) Christopher Pare (Mainz) Hermann Parzinger (Berlin) Heidi Peter-Röcher (Würzburg) Britta Ramminger (Hamburg) Jürgen Richter (Köln) Sabine Rieckhoff (Leipzig) Thomas Saile (Regensburg) Wolfram Schier (Berlin) Thomas Stöllner (Bochum) Wolf-Rüdiger Teegen (München) Biba Teržan (Berlin) Gerhard Tomedi (Innsbruck) Ulrich Veit (Leipzig) Karl-Heinz Willroth (Göttingen) Andreas Zimmermann (Köln)

ta b l e o f co n t e nt s

List of Figures. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 foreword of the series editor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 The Kiel Graduate School “human development in landscapes”. . . 12 Preface

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

acknowledgements. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 1. Has archaeology forgotten history?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21

1.1. The problem at hand . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 1.2. Studying societies in archaeology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 1.3. In defence of a philosophy of archaeology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31

2. Archaeology as a science of societ y . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33

2.1. The separation of the sciences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 2.2. The commitments of the causal mode of description. . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 2.3. Causal Necessity and Identitary Logic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 2.4. Institutions of meaning and object relations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41

3. The irreducibilit y of social action. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49

3.1. Homo sociologicus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49 3.2. Teleological explanations and intentional description. . . . . . . . . . . . 51 3.3. The paradox of human freedom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54 3.4. The agency within . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56

4. Archaeology and its objects of study. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63

4.1. Problematizing enquiry and archaeological theory. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63 4.2. Abstractions and generalizations are not the same thing . . . . . . . . . . 68 4.3. The objectification of archaeology. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70 4.4. Not the assumptions we want, but the assumptions we need. . . . . . . . 75

5. Archaeology and the meaning of objects . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77

5.1. Archaeology’s metaphysical quarrel and the locus of meanings. . . . . . 77 5.2. What does ‘meaning’ mean anyway? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82

5.3. Interpreting institutions of meaning. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86 5.4. The collapse and rebirth of the idealist/materialist distinction . . . . . . 90

6. Individuals and generaliz ations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93

6.1. Collapsing the structure and the individual . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93 6.2. Causal generalization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98 6.3. The subject of triadic relations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102

7. The historical understanding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

109

109 113 117 119

7.1. Modes of experience, comprehension, and description. . . . . . . . . . . 7.2. Historical past and the understanding of society . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.3. Understanding contexts and games. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.4. History as the objective understanding of the past . . . . . . . . . . . . .

8. The archaeologist as a detective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

123

123 126 129 134

8.1. The archaeological record as evidence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.2. Is the archaeological record a mirror of society?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.3. The small and the intellectual . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.4. Archaeology and the search for clues. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

9. Magical and religious rituals and their understanding . .

137

9.1. Can something be ‘magical’? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137 9.2. The ‘accidental’ religion. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .141 9.3. Curses and appeals to justice. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146 9.4. The Birth of an Institution. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147

10. The Life and Times of Bronze Age People . . . . . . . . . . . .

153

153 160 162 164

10.1. The Undiscovered Bronze Age of Southern Alentejo. . . . . . . . . . . . 10.2. Problematizing economy and meaning in prehistoric times . . . . . . . 10.3. Economic meaning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10.4. Death and the value of life in the Bronze Age. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

11. Archaeology and theory – future paths. . . . . . . . . . . . .

11.1. Collapsing theoretical divides and rebuilding them anew . . . . . . . . . 169 11.2. Towards archaeological theory and philosophy of archaeology. . . . . 170

12. SUMMARY/Zusammenfassung . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

169

171

12.1. Archaeology and the historical understanding. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171 12.2. Archäologie und historisches Verständnis. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174

References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179

l i s t o f f i gu r e s

Figure 1 Abraham Bosse’s Leviathan. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 Figure 2 Man standing defiantly against the tanks in Tiananmen, China, 1989.. . 97 Figure 3 The two ways in which to conceive explanation in archaeology. . . . . .106 Figure 4 The current thesis’ modes of description, Oakehsott’s modes of experience, and Mink’s modes of comprehension. . . . . . . . . . . 111 Figure 5 An example of a roman curse tablet. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138 Figure 6 Curse tablet from Sagunto, Spain. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147 Figure 7/8 Curse Tablet from Alcaçer do Sal, Portugal. Front and back view. . . . 148 Figure 9 Map of the Iberian Peninsula. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .153 Figure 10 Geological Map of Southern Alentejo. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 154 Figure 11 General view of part of Outeiro Alto 2. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .155 Figure 12 General view of Torre Velha 3 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .155 Figure 13 Table with overall number of negative structures, hypogea, and pits of Outeiro Alto 2 and Torre Velha 3. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155 Figure 14 The 4 types of hypogea of Outeiro Alto 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157 Figure 15 A hypogeum at Outeiro Alto 2. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157 Figure 16 Torre Velha 3 hypogeum – The interior of the funerary chamber. . . . 158 Figure 17 The filling of the antechamber of a hypogeum. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .158 Figure 18 Outeiro Alto 2 – Two strangled-neck vases in the centre and right.. . . 159 Figure 19 Outeiro Alto 2 – Pots with sharp inflection. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159

fo r e wo rd o f t h e s e r ie s e d ito r

Research on “landscape” as a product of both environmental conditions and the creation of social space is one of the most important issues in reconstructing and understanding past societies. Thus, past “Human Development in Landscapes” is the core topic of the Kiel Graduate School (GSHDL), which has been working in the framework of the Excellence Initiative since 2007. The following dissertation from the Graduate School “Human Development in Landscapes” represents a study in which Artur Seang Ping Ribeiro presents a sophisticated theoretical investigation of archaeology as positioned within historical understanding. In an elaborated use of archaeology as a science of society and of the idea of archaeologists as detectives, the author paves the

theoretical foundations to critically assess the past as history. The author leads us to an explanation as to how archaeology can effectively combine a historical understanding of the past with other modes of description. As a result, he argues that not only is it possible to understand the past through different modes of description, such as the teleological, the narrative, and the causal mode, but it is very desirable to do so. This book would not have been possible without the editorial work of the author and Eileen Kücükkaraca and the technical processing by Janine Cordts. The Graduate School heartily thanks all of them. Johannes Müller, Summer 2018

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THE GRADUATE SCHOOL „HUMAN DEVELOPMENT IN LANDSCAPES“

the kiel graduate sch oo l

“ human development i n l a n d s ca p e s ”

In order to gain an understanding of human development, an accurate description of the interactions between mankind and both physical and perceived environments is required. At Kiel University, this is exemplified by numerous graduate projects in the natural sciences that have been and are tackling archaeological problems, while, at the same time, cultural studies and archaeology provide important evidence and directions for scientific analysis. Intensified cross-linkages between academic disciplines, graduate researchers’ growing needs for analytical equipment and an efficient infrastructure, as well as an increasingly internationalized research community made it necessary to set up a multi-disciplinary Graduate School (GS). This school provides graduate students with access to new research and diverse communication structures, enabling them to conduct innovative investigations. The GS is part of the Excellence Initiative of the Federal German Government. We define landscape as a dynamic space of social, cultural, and ecological significance, which develops interactively with the human societies occupying it. Accordingly, we outline a GS concept that merges information from numerous fields, such as molecular biology and archaeology, geoinformatics and art history, geophysics and isotope research, ancient languages and palaeoecology, and written/oral traditions and palaeoclimate, in order to study and understand this interactive development. The dynamics of human development – and thus of landscape and living space – are captured by a complex interplay of diverse factors (biological traits of social groups, conditions of the natural environment, social constants and their material representations), which are covered by the joint research of our disciplines. The

results of this research yield new impulses for current landscape and cultural management.

the scientific concept The global theme of human development within cultural and natural environments is associated with the detection of cross-linkages between different factors: the influence of man on nature and vice versa. At present, the natural change of environmental conditions must be investigated at more precise timescales, while human impact on the environment needs to be understood. The creation of cultural environments over time and space amplifies the meaning of landscape: Apart from the impact of natural conditions on individual (health and genetics), ecological (soil, climate and vegetation) and technological (wind/ waterpower and natural resources) developments, social constants (social hierarchies and ideologies) also play a decisive role in the formation of landscapes. Social environments within this concept of landscapes are not only reflected by material remains but also by the spatial imprints of mobility and sustainability. The development of social space under specific ecological conditions is linked to the ideological systems which keep societies, for economic reasons or ritual purposes, together. In this respect, the study of landscapes does not only concern environmental, demographic, and social reconstructions but also the ideological changes regarding ”landscapes”, i.e. the conceptions that individuals and societies have concerning “nature”. The appropriation of landscapes by societies and their ambigu-

THE GRADUATE SCHOOL „HUMAN DEVELOPMENT IN LANDSCAPES“

ous symbolisms enable diverse reconstructions of the environments of different social groups and cultures. Highly dynamic spatio-temporal processes underlie the data collected by numerous disciplines of the Graduate School, whereby an understanding of these processes requires expertise in palaeoclimatic, palaeoecological, palaeodemographic and cultural research. Although the processes involved are of global character and apply to the entire span of human history, individual case studies emerging from the Graduate School concentrate primarily on the Holocene, which is the key era of interactions between humans and landscapes. These investigations focus mainly on Europe and adjacent regions.

three clusters and three platforms of research According to the underlying scientific concept, a breakdown of the relationship between cultural and natural environments into three general themes, which serve as the main research areas of the GS, is essential: • •

Society and Reflection: How did human groups conceive their natural and cultural environments and thus their landscapes? What means were employed by societies to structure these landscapes? Social Space and Landscape: How did demographic and technical changes influence the formation of social groups and landscapes? What kind of genetic differentiation is visible in animal and human groups after the pre-shaping of environmental conditions?

• Adaptation and Innovation: How did en vironmental conditions change and how was social space re-organised within the new local, regional, and global conditions? How did landscapes evolve after the itera tive processes of the interaction between nature and society and how can they be characterized? As the universally relevant factors that underlie the concept of landscape – defined as social space and natural environment bearing the activities of human groups – require the thematic cross-linkage of several disciplines, the PhD research proposed within the clusters is centered on highly interdisciplinary subthemes. Thus, this research is supported by three organizational platforms – the Communication Platform, the Technical Platform and the Humanities Platform. They provide a harmonization of scientific cultures and didactic aid, offer access to numerous tools and expertise in analytical methods and assist graduates with the acquisition of sources such as text and image databases.

contact [email protected] www.gshdl.uni-kiel.de

History deals in events, not states; it investigates things that happen and not things that are. As against this, archaeology, for instance, can only uncover and describe states, conditions and circumstances symptomatic of a particular way of life; it is unable to handle the fact of life, which is movement. Archaeological states follow jerkily one upon another, without description or explanation of the movement, and it matters nothing whether the transformation is gradual (undatable), as it usually is, or catastrophic. Geoffrey Elton The Practice of History

Time is neither reversible nor able to be discounted when dealing with cultural man or any segment of actuality whose interrelations it is desired to understand. Walter Taylor A Study of Archaeology

Theoretical categories do not represent free-floating, analytical devices which are innocent of historical content. Such categories are historical and they are transitory, they represent the ways we think ourselves into a reality which necessarily transform that reality in our eyes and thus transform our understanding of it. John Barrett Fragments from Antiquity

Dedicated to M.C.B.

p r e face

I was initially troubled when choosing this topic for my doctoral thesis as it is not common to choose in archaeology a topic that is so theoretical in nature. While most theses in archaeology have empirical data as the object under analysis, this thesis has a philosophical concept, one which I systematically defend throughout the following pages. Part of the reason for choosing this topic has to do with my disapproval of some of the trends currently coursing through archaeological practice, trends that have had a long-lasting effect on archaeology yet nevertheless fall short in doing what archaeology is meant to do: explain the past. As a trained archaeologist with many years of experience, my passion lies in the field among the elements which serve as evidence of human occupation, however, I quickly came to the realization that these elements would not help me understand what was wrong with archaeology. The problem, I realized, lies in archaeology itself and its concepts and methods of enquiry. The path up until this stage has not been easy: I never wanted to go into college nor did I ever want to be an archaeologist when growing up. Nevertheless, I ended up in college anyway, the University of Lisbon, where I first

fostered interest in understanding the past. From there, I spent years working in the field, in Portugal and Ireland, where I still feel I was at my happiest. Years later I thought it might be beneficial to turn my sights to Englishspeaking countries, which is why I went to University College London to do a Masters of Arts and continue pursuing my ever growing passion for archaeological theory. When writing my MA thesis, I received an e-mail with a call for PhD projects from the Graduate School “Human Development in Landscapes” at the University of Kiel, and I thought “Well… why not?” In the meanwhile I have made Kiel my home. I owe a great debt to the Graduate School “Human Development in Landscapes” given that they have supported me through thick and thin to make sure this thesis came to light. In return, all I can offer them is my expertise which has been translated into an explanation of what ‘development’, a key word in the name of the Graduate School, actually means or should mean to any social scientist who wishes to enquire about past societies. Artur Ribeiro, Summer 2018

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ac k n ow l e d g e m en t s

A work of this nature can never and should never be done alone and I have been fortunate to have had the help and support from colleagues and friends. I owe my gratitude to Prof. Johannes Müller and Prof. Antonia Davidovic for supervising this thesis. I am also grateful to Prof. Blättler for helping me through our discussions on current trends in philosophy. I must also thank Prof. John Barrett, Prof. Cheryl Makarewicz, and Prof. Tim Taylor for the advice they have provided me these past years. In Kiel, I owe much of my progress to Dr. Vesa Arponen as it was he who pointed out most of my rookie mistakes when it came to philosophy and I also must thank my friend and colleague Gustav Wollentz for proof-reading the thesis. I am also very thankful to Dr. Martin Furholt, Dr. Martin Hinz, Dr. Jutta Kneisel, Dr. Christian Horn, and Dr. Nicole Taylor, for their keen insight into matters concerning archaeological practice and theory. I also owe many thanks to Dr. Eileen Kücükkaraca for having written a german summary of this thesis, and to Janine Cordts for transforming the thesis into an actual book. I also owe a great debt to the friendship I established with Sanja Vucetic, Ana Franjic, Jessica Krause, Marco Zanon, Marion Bonazzi, Maria Gelabert Oliver, Tobias Danborg Torfing, Kleoniki Rizou, Milinda Hoo, Veronika Egetenmeyr, Taylor Hermes, Gianpiero di

Maida, Ingmar Franz, and Franziska Faupel. I am also grateful to Dr. Mara Weinelt and the rest of the administrative team at the Graduate School for making sure I had everything I needed for the successful conclusion of this thesis. In Portugal, I owe many thanks to Victor Filipe and Dr. António Valera for their help on matters related to Portuguese archaeology. I also need to thank Prof. Amilcar Guerra, Prof. João Carlos Senna-Martinez, and Prof. João Pedro Ribeiro. Of course, I owe my thanks to Prof. Sue Hamilton, Prof. Karen Wright, Prof. Ulrike Sommers, and Prof. Todd Whitelaw who guided me through the world of archaeology theory while I was in London. Although I have never personally met them, I thank Prof. Robert Preucel, Prof. Bas van Fraassen, Prof. Ray Brassier, Prof. Nigel Pleasants, Prof. L. A. Paul, for answering several technical questions concerning their work through e-mail. This project would have been incredibly dull if I had not benefited from the company of my partner Maren Biederbick. It is to her that I owe the pleasure of making my stay in Kiel a thoroughly enjoyable one. Finally, my thanks go to my parents, Mário and Min, and my sisters, Patricia and Claudia, for making sure I had everything I needed in this phase of my life.

1 has arc h a eo logy fo r gott e n h i s tory ?

1.1 the problem at hand Most people working in the human sciences readily recognize the importance of history and archaeologists are no exception (Taylor 1983 [1948], 26–27; Trigger 2006). Although this recognition exists, there is no consensus as to what role history should play in archaeology, for instance, some historical archaeologists believe archaeology is subservient to and parasitic upon history (Moreland 2003, 103); some archaeologists claim that archaeology has no relation to history and is, rather, the past tense of anthropology (Clarke 1978, 12; Renfrew/Bahn 1996, 11); and the few who truly believe history is important to archaeology have yet to articulate why they believe it is important in a coherent and systematic manner. Before we proceed, we must recognize the two main ways in which history can be understood: first, history can be seen as the discipline that studies the human past, during historical periods, primarily through written documents; second, history can be seen as the object of that research – what men and women actually did during certain times and places (Gallie 1964, 51). In archaeology, this translates into three large conceptions of history: as archaeological research aided by historical texts; as a set of methods and concepts which can be used in archaeology; and finally, as a way of interpreting the past. Naturally, there is considerable overlap between these conceptions, for instance, archaeological research aided by historical texts is also, generally, an archaeology interpreted historically. The first conception manifests in the form of historical archaeology, a long standing tradition in archaeological research (Deetz 1977;

Schuyler 1970), which counts with an exclusive journal (The International Journal of Historical Archaeology), an encyclopaedia (Orser 2002), and regular conferences. This form of archaeological research is, to a certain extent, the one that finds closest parallels with the early stages of archaeology, which emerged in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century Europe, and which focused on the civilizations which developed in the ‘Holy Land’, ancient Greece, and ancient Rome (Funari/ Jones/Hall 1999, 1). However, the archaeology practiced in these regions is not generally termed ‘historical’ archaeology but rather ‘classical’ or ‘pre-classical’ archaeology. The term ‘historical’ archaeology is usually reserved for archaeology of the ‘New World’ from the fifteenth century onwards (Deetz 1977, 5). Although it is usually interpreted as the archaeology of societies with written records, in the last decades some archaeologists have argued that this way of conceiving historical archaeology is too narrow and constraining (Deagan 1988; Funari/Jones/Hall 1999; Moreland 2003; Sauer 2006). For instance, in archaeology it is common to separate a prehistoric period from a historical period with the former concerning societies without written sources and the latter concerning societies with written sources. In North America, the introduction of writing via European colonization allows a sharp separation of a prehistoric and a historical period, but in Europe, the emergence of writing was a slow, gradual, and endogenous process which does not allow for a clear-cut distinction between these periods (Rowlands 1995). Moreover, classifying past societies as either ‘prehistoric’ or ‘historical’ leads to some biases, namely the idea that the advent of writing was some sort of revolutionary process which demands exclusive me-

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thods and practices. It would be more sensible to assume that the introduction of writing was just a phase not unlike the emergence of rock art, agriculture, or of state-like societies. Another issue that John Moreland has duly noted (2003, chapter 5) concerns the imperialistic overtones that the Americanist historical archaeology sometimes evinces (Deetz 1977, 5; Orser 1996, 27). By clearly separating the societies with writing from those without, historical archaeology perpetuates polarizing dichotomies like barbarism-civilization and primitive-advanced (Funari/Jones/Hall 1999, 3). However, not all Americanist historical archaeology has followed this path, in fact, Kathleen Deagan (1988), Mark Leone (Leone 2005; Leone et al. 1994), and Kent Lightfoot (1995) have argued that the capacity to look into the lives of those who are poorly represented in written records is one of the greatest advantages of archaeology. Albeit of great quality, historical archaeology is indeed quite narrow in its ambitions and scope. By adopting history in its disciplinary facet, historical archaeology has ignored the full potential of written records as material culture itself. Moreover, although most historical archaeologists recognize some of the advantages of history, very few have actually tried to extend historical principles into the prehistoric past, as exemplified by the work of Lyman and O’Brien (2001) and Marcus and Flannery (1994). According to the second conception, history is considered a practical discipline and as such, can contribute with distinct methods and practices to archaeological research. Unlike historical archaeologists, those who follow this conception focus less on the advantage of written records and more on the actual research methods and heuristics deriving from history. Of the few attempts at introducing historical methods and practices into archaeology, the most successful has been the incorporation of the Annales School of History. The Annales School has had a widespread adoption in archaeology (Bintliff 1991; Hodder 1987; Iannone 2002; Knapp 1992; Last 1995, 141– 145; Tabaczyński 2014), the most prominent sponsors being John Bintliff and Ian Hodder. In the historical discipline, this approach had its major breakthrough in France during the 1940’s – an approach which rejected the old

historiographical regime inherited from Ranke and was largely based on narration of feats of the ‘Big Men’ of history (Burke 1990). Against this older regime, the proponents of the Annales School promoted a history focused not on ‘Big Men’ but on the economic and social structure of society. Best represented by Fernand Braudel and his seminal La Méditerranée et le Monde Méditerranéen a l'époque de Philippe II (1972; 1973), the Annales School developed a historical method which divided time into three separate durations. The shortterm duration is represented by history of events, individuals, and politics, while the medium-term duration is represented by the study of medium termed structures called conjonctures which fall under the history of social and economic institutions, and finally, the longterm duration focuses on long-term changes in the environment and long-term social structures called mentalités (Bintliff 1991, 6ff.). In archaeology, Bintliff is the scholar who has most exploited what the Annales School has to offer, taking advantage not only of most of the ideas developed by Braudel’s but also other Annales historians like Le Roy Ladurie (Bintliff 1991, 2012, 2013). Ian Hodder, on the other hand, while also attracted to many ideas originating from the Annales School, has been more parsimonious, taking advantage only of the ideas relevant to understanding the long-term duration (Hodder 1987). Overall, the Annales approach seems to have had great success in archaeology as its methods and concepts are congenial to how archaeology is currently practiced. However, there are some concepts and ideas from the Annales School which have not escaped criticism (Hexter 1972; Hunt 1986; Kinser 1981; Santamaria/ Bailey 1984), criticisms which we shall explore in chapter 8. The third and final conception of history concerns how the past can be understood through a historical viewpoint and of the three ways of incorporating history into archaeology this is the one that is most underrepresented and misunderstood. Unlike the other two conceptions which consider history from a methodological point-of-view, historical understanding focuses primarily on historical interpretation, regardless of whether historical methods and written records are followed.

1 Has archaeology forgotten history?

This means that historical understanding is indifferent to the separation of prehistoric and historical periods. There have been attempts at developing ideas related to historical understanding in archaeology (e.g. Barrett 1994; Shackel/Little 1992) but these ideas were never capitalized upon, partly because archaeologists generally prefer to explain through ‘theory’ rather than explaining through history. Thus, there is still much confusion concerning what it means in archaeology to understand a past society from a historical perspective. The idea of a historical understanding, which serves as the title of the thesis, is borrowed from Walter B. Gallie’s work with a similar name, Philosophy and the Historical Understanding (1964). The way in which I conceive the notion of ‘historical understanding’ is not too different from the way it is conceived by Gallie, as we shall in chapter 7. Moreover, I also use the terms ‘historical understanding’ in order to differentiate it from historical archaeology and history as method. Unlike these other two areas, historical understanding is best understood from a philosophical standpoint which is why this thesis will give a prominent spotlight to philosophy in general, and in particular, to philosophy of history. Unlike traditional doctoral theses in archaeology which engage with the empirical record through research questions, this thesis aims at a systematic defence of historical understanding as a way of understanding past societies. In this endeavour, I hope to convince the reader that history is not only important – history is essential for our understanding of past societies, and an archaeology that wishes to claim itself a social science must recognize that the only way to understand social meanings is through the adoption of a historical understanding. Why is historical understanding important? As stated in the beginning of this chapter, most scholars in the human sciences realize that history is important, with some archaeologists directly supporting it (Barret 1994; Kohl 1984; Morris 2000; Pauketat 2001). However, there is no systematic explanation as to why history is important. This is the problem we currently have at hand. It seems undeniable that history is important, but as Paul

Roth has pointed out there is still reluctance in accepting history’s explanatory capacity (1988). Thus, historical forms of explanation are recognized as important, but are never put at the forefront. In archaeology, historical explanations are tacitly accepted but only if they allow the integration of theories of the general kind, which often come from neighbouring disciplines like sociology, anthropology, and human geography. There are considerable differences between describing reality through general theories and describing it through history. As Michael Oakeshott explains, there are several ways in which we, as humans, experience the world, and of those, there are two that are of interest to us in archaeology: the scientific and the historical (2015 [1933]). The best way to comprehend what the scientific understanding of the world entails comes from David Hume’s notion of constant conjunction – we understand the world because there is a constant conjunction between a given cause and an expected effect (Hume 1975 [1748], 26ff). As Hume also states, constant conjunctions are recognized by the repeated observation of particular instances, which means that these conjunctions of cause and effect are obtained from the observation of patterns of regularity in the world of state of affairs (Hume 1975 [1748], 42–44). From an archaeological point-of-view, we recognize causes by abductively or inductively observing effects, and by doing so, we infer by recognizing particular instances as a part of a larger pattern of regularities. In other words, we conclude that an object, event, or action occurred because it is what generally occurs. To a large extent, this is how archaeology, among most sciences, operate and should continue operating at its most basic. The historical understanding of the world operates in a different manner in that it is not based on the recognition of cause-effect conjunctions, it is based on the recognition that to understand certain events, objects, and people, one must place them within a narrative which provides them with intelligibility. Traditionally, it is assumed that these sequences of events can be reduced to cause-effect conjunctions, as argued by Carl Hempel (1942), however, if a certain history is reduced, the intelligibility obtained from a historical

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perspective is irretrievably lost. In other words, histories are unique and specific ways of understanding the world and reducing them to cause-effect conjunctions is to subsume them to a general way of perceiving the world. Oakeshott states the following: “There is no process of generalization by means of which the events, things and persons of history can be reduced to anything other than historical events, things and persons without at the same time being removed from the world of historical ideas. (…) In history there are no 'general laws' by means of which historical individuals can be reduced to instances of a principle, and least of all are there general laws of the character we find in the world of science.” (Oakeshott 2015 [1933], 123–124). In archaeology this has translated into two opposing perspectives – the more popular one is the implicit and sometimes explicit acceptance that the causes of human social behaviour are subsumable to generalization, and the less popular perspective is that of early twentieth century scholars of Mayanist archaeology like Alfred Tozzer, Samuel Lothrop, and Herbert Spinden (Kluckhohn 1940, 49 cited in Preucel 1991a, 2; McAnany 2007, 218) and more recently John Barrett (1994) who argue that the understanding of past societies requires following them in a historical and particularistic perspective. In large measure, archaeology, especially that of the USA and Europe has focused primarily on generalization. It is not entirely clear why this is so but it seems safe to say that part of the reason concerns the fragmentary nature of archaeological data. The innumerable gaps of the archaeological record might have led archaeologists to believe that these gaps could be filled by assuming how humans behave. Thus, explanations that focus on how people behaved in general are preferred over histories which are unique and particular.

As archaeology developed from the late nineteenth century to the mid twentieth century, archaeologists in the USA realized that archaeology could benefit immensely by following the ideas of its sister discipline: anthropology, which was, at the time a generalizing science1 (Ingold 2008). Predicated on the maxim that archaeology had to be anthropology or it was nothing (Willey/Phillips 1958, 2), a distinct school of archaeology arose in the 1960’s and 1970’s known today as ‘New Archaeology’ and shortly after as ‘processual archaeology’. During this time, the reliance on anthropology was much more than just a disciplinary fancy – it was the explicit acceptance that the causes of human behaviour could be subsumed under generalizing principles and this translated into two distinct ways of reasoning – during a first stage, it was assumed that all human behaviour could be understood under a general guiding principal – for instance, one of the founding fathers of processual archaeology, Lewis Binford, claimed that all culture could be understood as the extrasomatic means of human adaptation (1968a, 218; 1972, 23; 1978). At a second stage, assuming that all human behaviour could be understood under a general guiding principle, it was further assumed that specific human behaviour could be reduced to universal laws of behaviour (Binford 1968b, 267–268; Watson 1976; Watson/ Leblanc/Redman 1971). This generalizing mentality entailed, among some proponents of processual archaeology, a complete abandonment of history. For instance, Binford states that if archaeology dedicated itself to the historical reconstruction of the past it “(…) would be doomed to be a particularistic, nongeneralizing field” (1967, 234; emphasis mine). In the UK, a different version of processual archaeology developed which, like the American version, also held some anti-historical sentiments. This rejection is best seen in David Clarke who, although believed that “archaeology is archaeology is archaeology” (1978, 11), or in other words, a discipline of its own and

1 In the USA, the only school of anthropological theory which fully rejected generalization was the Boasian School which developed in the early decades of the twentieth century (Boas 1920, Harris 1968, K roeber 1935).


in its own right, also believed that archaeology is anthropology and ethnology with the addition of a time dimension (1978, 12), a view that is reflected in the conception of archaeology promoted by Leo Klejn (2001, 35; 132) and Colin Renfrew and Paul Bhan who also view archaeology as the ‘past tense of cultural anthropology’2 (1996, 11). In the 1980’s and 1990’s there was a strong backlash against the tenets defended in processual archaeology and this backlash gave rise to the school of archaeology known as ‘postprocessual archaeology’. Unlike processual archaeology, which leaned more towards scientific forms of enquiry (Vanpool and Vanpool 1999), postprocessual archaeology leaned more towards the social sciences and the humanities, with particular focus on ideas stemming from post-structural theory, Marxist philosophy, and critical theory (Patterson 1989, 556). Prima facie, the emergence of postprocessual archaeology seemed like a serious attempt to undermine and thoroughly replace the processual status quo. However, this purpose was not fulfilled as it was recognized that postprocessual archaeologists were basically following the same scientific methods and practices developed by processual archaeologists (Kosso 1991; Tschauner 1996; Vanpool/Vanpool 1999; Watson 1990). Once the dust settled, one could recognize that a large number of influences inherited from processual archaeology had survived unhindered. One of these influences was the reliance on general theory. John Barrett has been one of the few archaeologist openly condemning the reliance on general theory (1994, 1–4; see also Harding 2005), while many archaeologists not only openly embrace it, they assume that generalizing is something that is ultimately inevitable (Hodder 1986, 353; 1999, 205; Kristiansen 2004, 89; Renfrew 1984, 14–15; Trigger 1995, 451–454). Unlike processual archaeologists who explicitly accepted generalization, postprocessual archaeology embraced generalization

through a different route: postprocessual archaeologists did not support the idea that archaeology was a science dedicated to the identification of general laws of behaviour (Hodder 1982a) but they did support the idea of an ideal society, i.e. a general model of society. For the postprocessual archaeologists a society is not something that becomes or evolves, it is something that simply is, and can be enquired upon in the same way an ethnographer enquires upon an ‘ethnographic present’. Moreover, these societies are ideal in that they can be studied under the same guiding general concepts regardless of their social, economic, and technological status during a specific time in history. Thus, any and every society can be seen as the outcome of “power, negotiation, text, intertext, structure, ideology, agency, and so on” (Hodder 1991, 8). As we shall see throughout this thesis, things like ‘power’, ‘agency’, ‘structure’, are abstract, they are ‘concept-metaphors’ (Moore 2004) and as such, they are completely precluded from empirical verification. What does this mean? Well, postprocessual archaeology is based on premises which dictate how a society behaves in general, even before observing a single piece of evidence. Just like processual archaeology, postprocessual archaeology is based on a priori social frameworks through which all the archaeological data is translated – making the approaches of both these schools of archaeology top-down approaches. This has been repeated by John Barrett but through different words: “(…) both [processual and postprocessual] approaches claim to have discovered something which is generally true about what it is to be human. They claim that regularities displayed in the behaviour of human populations derive either from the behavioural responses to material stimuli (and which include social structural stimuli), or from the strategic deployment of historically specific knowledges and assump-

2 This is based on the 2nd ed. of Archaeology: Theories, Methods, and Practices (1996). From the 3rd ed. onwards, Renfrew and Bahn have included a section dedicated to the explaining the commonalities of archaeology and history (2003, 12).

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tions about how the world might be expected to work. In the latter case these knowledges also operate to sustain different forms of social authority. It would seem reasonable to view human populations as being reproduced by biological beings who are always capable of rethinking the realities which they inhabit.” (Barrett 1994, 164; emphasis mine). What does this involve? An archaeologist who follows the tenets of postprocessual archaeology already knows, before engaging with the archaeological record, that the specific society to be studied is structured in the way we, as a modern society, have aprioristically conceived it. The idea of past societies as ‘ethnographic presents’ is further supported by how postprocessual archaeologists perceive societies and their relation to the present and past. For the postprocessual archaeologist, the past is not something that exists independently of present interpretations of it (Hodder 1991, 11; Thomas 2000, 4; Thomas 2004, 1). The problem with this conception of the past is that it fails to recognize the heuristic value of perceiving past societies as a linear series of events, like stories which have a beginning and an end. This linear view of time has been criticized (Lucas 2005), but the alternative to thinking of the past as a linear series is to view societies as homeostatic bubbles e.g. Clarke 1978, 51; 76) or ‘ethnographic presents’ which are trapped in time. It is easy to state that ‘ethnographic presents’ are historical in that these ‘presents’ are subject to constant change – however, it is much harder to actually describe past societies in a historical manner. It is this lack of historical description that supports the perception of an archaeology which “can only uncover and describe states, conditions and circumstances symptomatic of a particular way of life; it is unable to handle the fact of life, which is movement. Archeological states follow jerkily one upon another, without description or explanation of the movement” (Elton 2002 [1969], 9). Even though some postprocessual archaeologists such as Ian Hodder have criticized the static view of past societies (Hodder/Hutson 2003, 31ff.), for Hodder archaeology is histo-

rical insofar as we engage with past societies through their own cultural lens (Hodder/ Hutson 2003, 125), or in ethnographic terms, an emic perspective. As Cobb explains, what defines historical explanation for one person might not be for another, nevertheless, there are two main ways in which to understand historical explanation in archaeology: “history as a concern with the particular and (…) history as an alternative form of explanation to ethnological explanation” (Cobb 1991, 169). On one hand, postprocessual archaeologists did support the idea that past societies were historical in that they developed cultural elements that were particular to their own society, on the other hand, they failed to recognize that these cultural elements could not be understood in an emic perspective. While it is true that history is particularistic, this principle itself contributes little in helping archaeologists understand the past in a historical manner because the only thing this principle implies is that past societies are different from other societies of the past and present and cannot be cross-culturally compared. Thus, although postprocessual archaeologists did indeed re-establish a link between archaeology and history, a link that was non-existent in processual archaeology, postprocessual archaeologists never really explored history to its full potential. In a way, postprocessual archaeology assumes the common idea that anything that is said about past societies is automatically historical, an idea that had been defended by Walter Taylor (1983 [1948], 43). This way of thinking about history, however, is incredibly unhelpful for archaeology because it basically defends that something is historical as long as it is old. In a gist, postprocessual archaeologists assume that the only difference between the ethnographic study of living societies and dead societies is that dead societies are historical while the living are not. While it is true that there is no ontological difference between prehistoric societies and living non-western societies like those of the Baringo or the Nuba (Hodder 1982b), there are, nevertheless, problems in assuming that the results of ethnographic analysis of dead societies will reflect those which are performed in living societies.


This might be one of the largest flaws in postprocessual reasoning. As Shennan states, “the focus of interpretation in archaeology today is increasingly on those aspects of the past which place archaeologists in the role of ethnographers of a lost 'ethnographic present', struggling hopelessly to overcome the problems posed by the fact that the people they would like to talk to are long dead and most of the residues of their lives long decayed” (2002, 9). The problem afflicting both processual and postprocessual archaeology is a series of hidden prejudices and these prejudices have been perceptively identified by Julian Thomas (2004). Of these prejudices, the most permeating is that of an essentialist notion of society (Thomas 2004, 100) – an ideal society which can be reduced to a formal set of essential characteristics, e.g. power, negotiation, practice, adaptation, structure, code, individuals, identities, agency, strategy, rules, etc. In other words, archaeologists of both processual and postprocessual vein work on the assumption that there is a general way in which all societies can be perceived. This assumption is, to a large extent, what makes anthropology and ethnology appealing. Like the ethnographer who engages with a living society during a static phase of their history, the archaeologist believes that the archaeological record is a reflection of a static phase of history of a dead society – as Linda Patrik has shown, processual and postprocessual archaeologists, rather than viewing the archaeological record as neutral evidence, they prefer perceiving the archaeological record as the result of social activity (1985). Intuition would deem this attitude acceptable but this same attitude betrays a hidden prejudice: that of already knowing what a society is and knowing that societies leave an archaeological record behind. Let us contrast this attitude with that of a detective investigating a murder: at no point does the detective assume that the evidence left by the murderer is a reflection of society, in fact, doing so would lead him nowhere in his investigation because what he needs is not a general understanding of how societies operate, all he needs is to know what happened. Concomitantly, by reducing the archaeological record to social activity (‘cultural dynamics’ in processual parlance or ‘codified text’ in post-

processual parlance) archaeologists elide their ideal image of society with the empirical data. For these archaeologists a sherd is never just a sherd – it is identity, it is negotiation, and it is power. Lost in these assumptions are the historical contexts which provide the story in which identity, negotiation, and power arise (Harding 2005).

1.2 studying societies in archaeology It can be objected that any and every systematic and serious study of societies requires a set of assumptions. This is true and this thesis is a testament to that. However, the question we should be focusing on concerns what those assumptions should consider: is it human behaviour in general? Is it how societies develop? Is it what constitutes a society? Or is it what makes us, archaeologists, believe that the past peoples were formed into societies in the first place? Much ink has been spilled to answer the ontological question of what a society is and much less to answer this self-reflexive question: how is it possible for us to know what societies are in the first place? While there are a wide variety of ways to think about societies, I present here the two main conceptions which are relevant to us, and I will focus on the more prominent one first – a society as a social collective. For our current purposes let us define a social collective as an aggregate of two or more people who share an arbitrary set of rules, customs, and institutions. According to this conception, a society is seen as a collective whole in which the social members are constituent parts. As parts of society, the individual members create ex nihilo (Castoriadis 1987) shared languages, customs, rituals, games, and institutions, which collectively can be interpreted as ‘culture’ (Tylor 1871, 1; White 1959, 3). By imagining a society as a collective of people, objects, and culture, one can study it by analysing its parts, which are related to the society as a whole. Moreover, conceived in this manner, the social collective can be subdivided into arbitrary categories and each of these categories

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can have a corresponding scientific discipline that analyses it: the market, as studied by economics, the state, as studied by the political sciences, the civil society, as studied by sociology, the sociological past, as studied by history, and non-western societies, as studied by anthropology and ethnology (Wallerstein 2003, 454). Archaeology falls somewhere between the study of past societies and the study of non-western societies. Naturally, this is a very crude and generic view of the social sciences and we know that there is much more interdisciplinarity and overlap than this view suggests. Nevertheless, what is of interest to us in this categorization of the social sciences is the fact that these disciplines reflect interest in subject matter more than in method. So sociology, for instance, does not necessarily have a method exclusively its own that is applicable only to civil society – what it does have is an arbitrary group of people and institutions which it takes interest in. The same goes for economics, which is basically the study of the financial and monetary institutions of modern societies. How is it then, that economics is not also considered sociology even though economics is basically studying the same group of people as sociology yet from a different perspective? Underlying this question concerns what makes a discipline qualify as a social science and simply put, it seems that as long as the research pertains to people in virtue of them being social beings, any and every discipline can be considered a social science. In archaeology, it seems clear that every human we research upon is a social being which would mean that most archaeological research is social in nature. However, this way of reasoning is unhelpful because it dilutes the notion of ‘society’. If “everything is social” (Hodder 2007, 26) then an archaeology of the social would have to be about everything. As Timothy Webmoor and Christopher Witmore state: “In stating that social processes, or social meanings, or social discourse accounts for the events of the past, we seem to be stating less than we would like to. Something fundamental and potent is at work with the ‘social’, but our explanations have come to be cloaked in a shroud of secrecy with re-

gard to what the social is. Or perhaps there simply is a tautology at work, as the social is not, in fact, doing any work whatsoever. The ‘social’ comes as a stand-in, a modifier, a catch-all prefix. It attaches itself, as if by super glue, first to domains of study: ‘social lives’, ‘social meaning’, ‘social body’, ‘social structure’, ‘social landscape’; then it goes on to define the very fields undertaking research into these domains: ‘social archaeology’.” (Webmoor/Witmore 2008, 53). A big part of the problem is that a social collective can be composed of any arbitrary category: individuals, organizations, roles, networks, etc. (Latour 2005a, 28) and thus, any conception of society is valid as long as it refers to a collective of real or imagined objects. To overcome this unwanted situation, in which the notion of ‘society’ has become a mere buzzword, requires recognizing a second way of conceiving society. This second conception does not concern society per se but the elements that make socialization possible. This has been briefly touched by Michael Shanks and Christopher Tilley who have made a good point in arguing that there is no such thing as a society in terms of an immutable totality, or as they state, “[n]othing exists in itself, self-identical, a full presence to itself in a relationship of total interiority” (Shanks/Tilley 1987, 57). For Shanks and Tilley, archaeological research should focus on the active role of social negotiation witnessed in all aspects of daily life (Hodder 2007, 26). The question we must ask ourselves is what makes past societies social in the first place – how is it that we know that pottery sherds and burials are representative of social action? When we correlate the material record with social action – for instance, pottery sherds with the social act of pottery manufacturing – any question we might have, pertaining to the social, that involves pottery are questions concerning why humans, as active members of a society, made those pots in the way they did. Answering these questions cannot, obviously, involve neither circular statements nor platitudes about social action. Furthermore, the answer can also not be found by establishing a cause-effect sequence because there simply is no cause-effect sequence in nature that


forces biological beings to make pots. The production of pottery is a social act and as such is irreducible to cause-effect sequences (Descombes 2014, 219ff.). Making pottery is an act that requires a context of intelligibility in which making pottery is something that makes sense to do. However, this does not automatically provide an answer to the question “why did a certain group of people make pots in the way they did?” which means that stating that “a certain group of people made pots the way they did, because they lived in a context conducive to such behaviour” is not an answer. The answer lies in understanding how such a context came into existence in the first place (Barrett 1994, 2006; Harding 2005). Unlike causal explanations which appeal to generalizable cause-effect sequences, the study of the underlying social nature of societies must rely on historical explanations. Why is that? A social action, is an action which is teleologically performed according to an institution of meaning (Descombes 2014). Gift-giving, feasting, hierarchies, craftsmanship, all require the objective recognition of specific institutions of meaning. For instance, to give something to another person requires accepting the institution of private property, i.e. what is mine and what is thine. These institutions are what give meaning to the things we have – banknotes, for instance, are money in virtue of the financial and banking institutions that exist today (Searle 1995). To be clear, money is not the belief that the pieces of paper in our wallet have transactional value – money is simply money in virtue of it being money. Not all cultures engage economically through money which means that not all cultures developed historically in the same way – which, in turn, means that to understand money as a social item we must understand how it developed and came into existence. Institutions of meaning exist independently of the members of society who follow them which means that they are real things that exist in this world. Institutions of meaning are not “in the head” of social actors nor are they mere reifications. Institutions are things which are located within space and time, and consequently, have a history. This second concepti-

on of society is not one based on the actual objects that together form the aggregate of society but on the institutions of meaning which gives social relationships and social action their justification, and consequently, their intelligibility. There are two consequences to these ideas, which will be addressed further into the thesis: the first is the collapse of the nature/nurture distinction and the second is the collapse of the individual/collective distinction. In the first case, what is being argued in this thesis is not the fact that human behaviour cannot be explained by appealing to biological imperatives because these imperatives can, in fact, explain human behaviour. However, the appeal to biology is exactly that: biology. This can be elucidated with the following analogy: if we identify a man on an island, who is stranded and has never had contact with other human beings, one automatically cannot describe his behaviour in social terms because there is no society in which his actions are accorded social meaning (Winch 2008 [1958], 31ff.). Biology, however, can help us describe his actions but those descriptions could never be conceived as social. The fact that social action are always performed in the context of a given institution of meaning implies that the social action only makes sense with regards to the context in which it is understandable – or in other words, social action is always an intention towards the external world. Therefore, social action cannot be understood by looking at the human per se. Just as dancing cannot be understood by observing the musculature of humans, money cannot be understood by putting a banknote under a microscope (Noë 2009). This does not mean that biology does not have a role to play because it does, what it cannot do is answer the questions that pertain to the social. Thus, instead of categorizing human actions as essentially being either social or biological we must recognize that what we are doing is viewing human action through different perspectives (Giere 2006), or in Oakeshott’s words, through different modes of experience (2015 [1933]). The second collapse concerns individualism and collectivism: the notion of institution of meaning obviates the necessity for these terms because from a social point of view, individuals and collectives are the result of social cons-

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truction. What I mean by social construction is that individuals and collectives refer not to any putative ontological object but to the fact that the concepts of ‘individual’ and ‘collective’ are only intelligible within societies – which means that societies cannot be automatically composed of either individuals or collectives. This is quite evident in the study of identity logic: someone’s identity is not dependent on what is unique to that person but rather on what makes that person similar to other people. For instance, identifying myself as a Chinese individual is pointing to a nationality which is shared by another 1.5 billion individuals on this planet. How is it then, that something that individualizes is also something that is shared by so many other people? It is because individuality is a social status relative to other people, in this case, when I say that I am Chinese, I am claiming that I am of a nationality that is not American, English, French, Swedish, and so on (Descombes 2016). Once again, individuality would be unintelligible to someone stranded on an island precisely because he is not within a society in which individuality can be manifested. Similarly, a collective is also a social status in that it is not some sort of ontological being made out of several human beings, it is a social construction itself. These topics will be explored throughout the thesis and will be compared to traditional and current perspectives in archaeology. One thing to keep in mind is that that the past is populated by people just like you and me – they are neither machines following pre-programmed orders nor are they animals following natural instincts. The difference between a man living in Europe in the Bronze Age and a man living in Europe today concerns what institutions of meaning were in effect then and are in effect now – it is only by recognizing how these institutions emerged, transformed, and died, that one can understand what has changed in the thousands of years that separate us.

1.3 in defence of a philosophy of archaeology Traditionally, a doctoral dissertation in archaeology adopts a format in which there is a sample of material or archaeological sites which serves as a case-study. These samples can be a certain region, a certain number of artifacts, a type of archaeological feature, or a type of artefact from a group of sites, or artefacts and sites of an entire region. Sometimes the sample is chosen based not on artifacts but on a cultural period, like the Palaeolithic, the Neolithic, the Roman period, or Islamic period. On occasion there are also doctoral dissertations in which a model of analysis is developed and tested against the archaeological record. Much less common are the dissertations, like the current one, which can be qualified as ‘theoretical’. The current thesis is theoretical in that it focuses not on an archaeological sample or case-study but on a theoretical concept: the historical understanding. Although very uncommon, this type of dissertation is not unheard of. For instance, Walter Taylor’s A Study of Archaeology (1983 [1948]), a book dedicated exclusively to the discussion of theoretical issues pertinent to archaeology, is a doctoral thesis which was submitted in 1943 to the University of Harvard. Another example comes from Alison Wylie, who was one of the sharpest critics of processual archaeology, and who wrote a doctoral dissertation in 1982 dedicated to theoretical concerns in archaeology titled Positivism and the New Archaeology. The choice to focus on a theoretical issue is a response to some partial perspectives on what ‘theory’ actually means. For many archaeologists, theory is simply everything that is not objective and concrete and, given the fact that archaeology is a science of actual concrete and objective things, many view theory with suspicion, as if theory would make archaeology less scientific. Simultaneously, there are many archaeologists who accept theory and will discuss it at conferences and in print (Johnson 1999, xi), however, many of these same archaeologists will concede that theory is important insofar as it ‘explains’ the archaeological record. To understand these attitudes


we need to recognize what theory should actually mean to archaeologists. As will be discussed in chapter 4, theory has a large variety of definitions in archaeology but there are primarily two main ways to define theory: as a form of explanation and as a philosophical discussion. As a form of explanation, theories are understood as ways of explaining past phenomena, usually by resorting to abstract notions or to general causes. As a philosophical discussion, theory is the analysis of the epistemological, metaphysical, and conceptual concerns in archaeology (Salmon 1993). Of these two, my dissertation will be focusing on this latter way of ‘theorizing’. Although I can only talk from personal experience, this latter way seems to raise more suspicion than usual. I can only surmise that it is because it does not focus on the gritty physicality of archaeological practice but on ideas and concepts. Moreover, given that this type of theorizing does not actual provide explanations of an archaeological nature, many archaeologists believe it to be useless (Johnson 1999, 6). The problem with this attitude is that it is based on a fallacy which I will be exploring: both explanatory and philosophical theories are not meant to be ‘used’ or ‘applied’3. For instance, many of the ideas defended in this thesis are based on the philosophy of Vincent Descombes – however, this does not mean that I am promoting a ‘Descombian Archaeology’. A Descombian Archaeology is not possible simply because Descombes has never provided, in his work, any particular insights concerning past societies. To explain past societies is to provide causes, reasons, and stories, on why things were the way they were in the past and on this matter Descombes, Deleuze, Giddens, Levi-Strauss, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, are of no help. So for example, if an archaeologist identifies a new Palaeolithic site in the Caucasus, the theories developed by Giddens and Levi-Strauss provide no help in understanding the site because neither of them have

addressed Palaeolithic archaeology in the Caucasus. This, of course, begs the question: why turn to Descombes, Giddens, or Deleuze if they cannot help archaeologists explain the archaeological record? As Winch explains, philosophy is neither something that is ‘used’ to the benefit of the empirical sciences (2008 [1958], 3) nor is it some form of a priori pseudo-science (2008 [1958], 7) – it is a systematic and coherent way of enquiring how, why, and in what ways reality is intelligible. Similarly, theoretical discussion in archaeology should be a discussion on how, why, and in what ways the past is intelligible to archaeologists. It is on this level that theorizing is important and where thinkers like Descombes, Giddens, and Deleuze can be of help. In order to keep things clear, I differentiate ‘philosophy of archaeology’ from ‘theory’. This latter term will be used to denote scientific explanations used in archaeology. The idea of a philosophy of archaeology can be quite misleading in that there is not and there never can be a philosophy dedicated exclusively to archaeology. What there can be, however, is an ongoing discussion that melds philosophy of science and the assumptions that are held by archaeologists and it is on this level that a philosophy of archaeology can truly exist (see Krieger 2006; Preucel 1991b; Salmon 1993; and Schiffer 1981 for different views on this issue). There are many topics that can be broached in this ongoing discussion from methods of inference and their legitimacy, ontological presuppositions, the ethics of archaeological practice and heritage management, the potential for interdisciplinarity in archaeology, understanding relativity and subjectivity and their contribution to positionality and the perspectives of those underrepresented in science, etc. but the topics I will be engaging with will concern, to a large extent, the philosophical notions of explanation and understanding and, to a lesser extent, issues of a metaphysical nature in archaeology.

3 Michael Smith argues that there are set of theories, less known to archaeologists, which can be applied to archaeological record and which he calls ‘empirical theories’ (2011, 172–173). While I agree with Smith on this issue, I do not consider these empirical theories as theories at all but rather empirical ‘models’.

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In terms of the type of analysis and critique I provide throughout the thesis, I loosely model my work according to the immanent and linguistic critique adopted by Vincent Descombes (1986; 2001; 2014). Strictly speaking, an immanent critique is a critique which judges a theoretical argument in light of its own standards and criteria (Pleasants 1999, 10). A genuine immanent critique serves as a safeguard against dogmatism given that the objective of this type of critique is to lead an argument to its ultimate logical conclusions and verify if these conclusions result in contradiction, circularity, or insistent repetition (Descombes 1986, 3–4). For example, an immanent critique of the empiricist principle “all knowledge is a result of empirical observation” would be to question whether this principle also comes from empirical observation. Another example of immanent critique would be to ask whether the hermeneutical dictum “everything is an interpretation” is also an interpretation in itself. In practice, immanent critique aims at considering an argument in all its logical facets (Descombes 1986, 3). Given that this thesis is not a philosophical essay in the strict sense of the word, my version of the immanent critique is not genuine as it focuses on other aspects of the arguments which will be the object of my critique. First, my method of critique focuses on arguments and ideas in archaeology and asks whether they do what they actually claim to do. For example, if a certain theory claims that it can, through the theory alone, provide an explanation of a given society, my critique will question whether this is actually true. If the argument under scrutiny requires employing theories, techniques, and methods, from other sources or if the argument devolves into buzzwords and platitudes, I will consider the argument to be inadequate.

Moreover, one of the assumptions I follow is that there is no concrete ontological difference between human beings living in the long-lost past and human beings living in present western and non-western societies, thus collapsing the difference between Us and the Other (sensu Staszak 2008) my critical analysis will subject competing archaeological arguments to hypothetical scenarios of the modern western world. Examples of this type of analysis will be present throughout the thesis. Simultaneously, the critical analysis will also serve as a defence of the idea of a historical understanding. Of course, the thesis does not intend to convince the readers that the notion of a historical understanding is some sort of magic bullet which can serve as the best method of enquiry in archaeology, however, it does intend to convince that it is the only viable option to specific types of enquiry in archaeology, namely those that focus on understanding society and social action. With this effort in mind, the thesis will be divided into three parts: chapters 2 to 6 focusing on general theoretical concerns, namely, explanation, understanding, science, particularism, generality, etc. Chapters 7 and 8 will turn to more concrete matters, namely, how historical understanding is effectively possible in archaeology. Chapters 9 and 10 will focus on two examples in which historical understanding provides stronger and better explanations than some of those which are currently in vogue. Finally, chapter 11 will present a short summary concerning the relvance of historical understanding to archaeology. Now that these initial considerations have been introduced, let us look into some of the arguments presented earlier in this chapter in a little more detail

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2 archaeo logy a s a s c i e nc e o f s oc i et y

2.1 the separation of the sciences This chapter elaborates on some of the ideas that were briefly addressed in the first chapter and intends to take them to their logical consequence. Of these ideas, I intend to start off with what explanation and understanding entails, and to provide a grasp on the relationship of archaeology with the empirical sciences and the social sciences. In order to do this, it is crucial to understand what the aims and methods of archaeology actually are. This understanding will then, unavoidably, have to take into account the different ways we, as scientists, can explain reality. Moreover, this understanding also requires us to look into whether archaeologists want to be empirical scientists, social scientists, or a combination of both. If archaeologists wish archaeology to be a social science, there needs to be a coherent understanding of what being ‘social’ means. It seems logical that the social sciences study societies but what type of societies? Do the social sciences study wolf packs or ant colonies in social ways? Or is it something else that the social sciences are aiming towards? As we saw in the previous chapter, these questions are all related to how societies are understood and as we shall see throughout this thesis, human societies can be described in a very distinctive way. A human society is not however, metaphysically different from anything else. In this sense, humans are no different from ants, wolves, atoms, neutrinos. Humans are also not distinct from other types of being because of ‘agency’, ‘consciousness’, ‘mind’, or any other vague concept of the sort. We are distinct simply because we can address ourselves as intentional actors (Taylor 1964). Furthermore, we

can also describe ourselves in the same way as ants and wolves just as we can describe inert objects in the same way as we describe human societies (“Dingpolitik” in Latour 2005b and “Democracy of Objects” in Bryant 2011 come to mind). Even though there are a varied number of ways of enquiring about reality (Kellert/ Longino/Waters 2006; Giere 2006) it does not derive that all forms of enquiry are adequate. Depending on what question is being asked, archaeology can either aim towards theories that explain in a general way, i.e. theories that are applicable to a broader number of cases, or archaeology can aim towards the specific, i.e. a historical narrative or local description of a given phenomenon. In this latter case, archaeologist must refrain in applying theories of the general kind, because historical narratives cannot be generalized without compromising the structure of historical understanding (Oakeshott 2015 [1933], 123–124). The use of general theories is widespread in archaeology and has contributed to archaeology’s continued success as a scientific discipline. Although the use of theory in archaeology antedates the 1970’s (Daniel 1963; Trigger 2006), it was during the rise of processual archaeology, a period of “loss of innocence” (Clarke 1973), that explanations by medium of general theories became commonplace. These theories, usually originating from disciplines like anthropology, sociology, psychology, and human geography, are ‘used’ and/or ‘applied’ in archaeology in a wide variety of manners. In fact, any individual theory can serve multiple purposes. There have been many theories coursing through archaeology like Leslie White’s cultural evolutionism (Binford 1965, 205; 1968b, 218; 1972, 22); cultural ecology (Binford 1968b, 218; 1972, 23;

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1978); phenomenology (Hamilton et al. 2006; Tilley 1994; 2004); sociological theses like Gidden’s theory of structuration (Barrett 1988; Hodder 1982a; 1985); agency theory (Dobres/Robb 2000, 2005; Dornan 2002; Johnson 1989; Robb 2010); Marxist theory (McGuire 1993; Spriggs 1984; Trigger 1993); evolutionary theory (Boone/Smith 1998, Dunnell 1980; Shennan 2002); embodiment theory has also been influential (Meskell 2005; Meskell/Joyce 2003; Shanks 1995); and on lesser scale, game theory (Bird/O’Connell 2006), rational choice theory (Blanton/ Fargher 2008), and many more, too numerous to name here. Archaeology is also, of course, non-theoretical and there are still traditions in archaeology that simply reject theorizing and prefer tracing the real lineages of development of specific cultures (Trigger 2006, 312). To a large extent, this practice is what most archaeologists outside the United States, the UK, and Scandinavia, actually follow. This type of archaeology, sometimes denoted as ‘culture-historical’, continues to play a predominant role in archaeological practice. As Michael Smith asserts (2011), not all archaeology needs to be theoretical, in fact, there are projects in archaeology that can and should be primarily historical. This is what the current thesis contributes towards. Ultimately, I wish to commend here the idea that social action can be understood from a teleological point-of-view and that this view can be best understood in a historical fashion. The notion of society is inalienable from an idea of understanding, and a human is social only in that he or she is able to understand reality. Thus, archaeologists who wish to enquire this social aspect of the past must necessarily view this understanding from a historical and narrative perspective. To pursue this argument, it is essential to recognize certain trends in the sciences in general, namely, the dichotomy that exists since the nineteenth century which entailed the separation of the sciences into Naturwissenschaften and Geisteswissenschaften (Dilthey 1989 [1883]) also known as the Galilean and Aristotelian traditions of scientific research (von Wright 1971, 2) – a separation that can also be found in the work of Comte, Mill, and Droy-

sen (Descombes 2001, 30). This dichotomy however, can be broken down into a trichotomy, as Droysen intended (von Wright 1971, 172), but unlike Droysen who believed the sciences could be divided into the philosophical, physical, and historical method, I view the three main branches of sciences divided into models of explanation which can be termed the empirical, the social, and the historical. Furthermore, there are also three main forms of description, the causal mode of description which is generally associated to the empirical sciences and the social sciences, the teleological mode of description which is discussed in philosophy, and the narrative mode of description which is generally associated to the historical sciences. Why divide the sciences in this way? If we look outside the disciplines and look at how they developed throughout the late nineteenth and most of the twentieth century (Wallerstein 2003) there is no consensus as to what can be considered a valid scientific explanation. Nevertheless, there were some forms of explanation that held more influence than others, like those originating in positivist philosophy. Positivists like Mill and Hempel argued that it was possible to produce knowledge through a single method and this idea remained quite prevalent in the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, but not everyone was content with this situation and several groups of scholars tried to demarcate different forms of scientific explanation which could not be subsumed under the monistic positivist method. Of these groups of scholars, there are three of interest to us: the hermeneuticists which included Wilhelm Dilthey, R. G. Collingwood, and Benedetto Croce; the intentionalists which included G. E. M. Anscombe, Charles Taylor, Peter Geach, and George von Wright, and finally, the defenders of history William Dray, W. B. Gallie, and Maurice Mandelbaum. Of these three groups, the hermeneuticists and intentionalists can be combined into a single group since their arguments were founded upon the same principle: that human actions can only be understood within a specific social context (Winch 2008 [1958]). William Dray shared some of the same concerns of the hermeneuticists and intentionalists (see Dray 1957,

2 Archaeology as a science of society

118ff.) but ultimately, his demarcation relied on the idea that history could not be subsumed under generalizing forms of explanation. We can see whether archaeology is more historical or more empirical by asking the following question: when we identify a past society, do we explain it as a result of forces/causes/ mechanisms that are generalizable to many societies or do we explain by medium of its own particular history? Those who lean more towards general causes prefer the empirical sciences and those who leans towards historical particularism tend to prefer history. However, the easiest way to answer this question would be to concede that the study of societies is a combination of both general causes and particular historical contexts. This option, albeit attractive, is nothing more than a rhetorical sleight of hand. By throwing history into the realm of general force/causes/mechanism one is not in fact making a past society more historical, one is generalizing history. For instance, one of the main ways of giving humans the capacity for inventiveness and social choice is through the notion of agency (see chapter 3 and 6). Agency provides the element necessary for humans to evolve/develop as it gives them leg room to wiggle up against the throes of causal determinism. However, while it may seem that agency would make societies historical in a certain way, the fact that agency is oftentimes described as a general cause that explains how actions are initiated (e.g. Gell 1998, 20) implies that agency is a general way of explaining human behaviour. As Nigel Pleasants has brilliantly argued, agency is not an innate capacity of humans (nor objects for that matter) but something that only makes sense within specific social contexts (1997). The central idea of agency, i.e. that humans have “freedom to choose otherwise” (Chisholm 1976), requires a historical and social situation where the act of choosing is something that makes sense. To talk about societies in a particularistic manner one cannot simply assert that they are particular, one has to actually demonstrate their particularity, and agency theory lacks this explanatory capacity. With this in mind, understanding the trichotomous separation of the sciences is essential. On this issue, it is not the sciences as we know them today that are important given that

what we see today is more a result of how academic institutions developed historically - it is not “disciplines” per se that we need to look at but the modes of description that are preferred by specific disciplines. These modes of description in turn relate to metaphysical commitments regarding how the world operates. Understanding these commitments can help elucidate why certain forms of explanation are deemed acceptable by some scientific disciplines and not by others. With this effort in mind, one could pick up any of the debates that pitted those who supported either history, social science, or natural sciences, during the late eighteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. I have chosen Carl Menger and his role in the methodenstreit affair because Menger identified many of the problems that the empirical sciences were facing at the time, and which in retrospect, are of importance to our understanding of the sciences today. The methodenstreit was a late nineteenth century dispute between the then dominant German historical school and its influence on economics, and the Austrian school represented by Menger himself. Of interest to us is the 1883 publication of Menger’s Untersuchungen über die Methode der Socialwissenschaften und der politischen Ökonomie insbesondere translated to Investigations Into the Method of the Social Sciences, with Special Reference to Economics (1985 [1883]). This book was primarily a critique of the German historical school which was, at the time, propounding a classic empirical and inductivist view of economic science. This empiricism and inductivism is inherited directly from the Humean notions of cause which can be defined as “an object, followed by another, and where all the objects similar to the first are followed by objects similar to the second” (Hume 1975 [1748], 76). This is also known as the regularity view of causation (Psillos 2002, 19). For Menger, economic studies require taking into account two completely separate ways of addressing economic phenomena: the historical and the theoretical way. The historical way, which Menger dubs ‘concrete’, is what we could also call ‘particularistic’ or ‘specific’: “[w]e understand a concrete phenomenon in a specifically historical way (through its history)

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by investigating its individual process of development, i.e. by becoming aware of the concrete relationships under which it has developed and, indeed, has become what it is, in its special quality” (1985 [1883], 43). The theoretical way, concerns how these concrete phenomena are then subsumed under patterns of regularity, i.e. in conformity with a law of nature (1985 [1883], 44–45). There are several relevant ideas that came out of Menger’s criticism but there is one that stands out: the two types of reasoning, historical and theoretical, cannot be subsumed under one single methodological project because the resulting explanation of these two types of reasoning are inherently incompatible: “If we summarize what has been said, then the question is easily answered concerning the true nature of those errors into which the historical school of German economists has fallen, as far as the view that theoretical economics is a historical science is concerned. It does not distinguish the specifically historical understanding of economy from the theoretical and confuses the two. That is, it confuses the striving for the understanding of concrete economic phenomena by means of history or by means of the theory of economy with the research in these sciences itself, and most particularly with the research in the field of theoretical economics. It thinks it is contributing to the theory of economy and describing it by undertaking to attain the understanding of concrete facts and developments of economy, and to deepen this understanding, by calling upon history and the theory of economy.” (Menger 1985 [1883], 46). By criticizing the way how concrete phenomena were subsumed under laws of behaviour, Menger was criticizing the then prevailing inductive logic of the German historical school. The discussions surrounding induction and later on, deduction, is one that permeated the intellectual history of Europe in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century (Stadler 2004). Moreover, Menger’s work prefigures many of the critiques that we see develop more thoroughly throughout the

twentieth century, namely, the problem of induction as addressed by Karl Popper in his The Logic of Scientific Discovery (2002 [1935]), the existence of a priori beliefs as addressed by Ludwik Fleck (Cohen/Shnelle 1986) and Thomas Kuhn (2012 [1962]), and the focus on the concrete as addressed by Popper in his The Poverty of Historicism (1960).

2.2 the commitments of the causal mode of description Although Menger recognized the incompatibility of the theoretical and historical type of explanation, there were philosophers who believed that all reality could be understood exclusively through the theoretical mode, or in other words, all reality could be understood by identifying causes. It seems indisputable that society in general, and the sciences in particular, require something called a ‘cause’ not because ‘cause’ itself is something that metaphysically exists but because as part of a society ourselves, we have created contexts where justification is required. When a recession occurs, when a child gets sick, when a politician becomes corrupt, when someone arrives drunk to work, when a species goes extinct, or when a coffee goes cold, we are automatically primed to identify a ‘cause’ for these situations because it just seems so counter-intuitive to our scientific culture that something might not have a cause. This idea, that everything is causally necessary, can be traced back to philosophers like Descartes and Spinoza, but it is through Leibniz’s principle of sufficient reason that it became norm. Since everything must come out of something, it seems logical that everything that is occurring today must have a reason to be. The problem with this type of reasoning is that it leads down the road that everything must be necessary for everything else, to wit, that if we posit the idea that there is at least one necessary being, then everything is somehow necessary, i.e. predetermined (Meillassoux 2008, 33). From a scientific perspective, the


principle of sufficient reason is translated into the idea that nothing is contingent. Concomitantly, if everything has a cause, then everything is explainable. At its extreme, the principle of sufficient reason devolves into a methodological monism which claims to be able to explain everything by identifying the necessary causes in question. This begs the question: how does reality change or evolve if everything is predetermined by laws of nature? Philosophers of science, like Roy Bhaskar for instance, answer this question by saying that there are sequences in nature which are completely accidental (2008 [1977], 8), and consequently, cannot be explained by the empirical sciences. Then what is it that the sciences explain? In the empirical sciences, the causal mode explains by identifying the necessary cause for a certain phenomenon to occur, however, it does not explain the conditions in which that phenomenon can occur. This can be illustrated by answering the following question: why do people get drunk? The causal mode assumes that there is a necessary cause without which drunkenness in humans could not occur and that cause is the degradation of ethanol within the human body. However, a necessary cause, like drunkenness, also requires a set of conditions without which the cause could not occur (Hempel/ Oppenheim 1948, 188). Naturally, given that conditions can be accidental, history is evoked as one of the methods which can identify the conditions which lead to causes. In the case of drunkenness, the narrative mode of description relays the set of events which provide the context in which people started drinking. This would mean that scientists can explain by evoking causes and historical conditions but this is actually something that most empirical scientists avoid. For nomothetists like Hempel and Bhaskar, what is important is drunkenness’ true cause - the chemical process related to the degradation of alcohol in the body. As Bhaskar puts it himself, “[i]t is a condition of the intelligibility of experimental activity that in an experiment the experimenter is a causal agent of a sequence of events but not of the causal law which the sequence of events enables him to identify.” (2008 [1977], 1). In the philosophy of the empirical sciences, only laws are seen as

necessary (van Fraassen 1989) because the whole process of the empirical sciences entails the reduction of the complexity of the universe into individuated and determinate causes. Archaeology is then faced with a difficulty given that it is a science which is simultaneously empirical and historical, and thus, it must contemplate explanations which employ both laws and historical conditions. This is, in a way, how archaeological reality is conceived: partly determined, necessary and lawful and partly undetermined, contingent, and particular (Trigger 1991, 553–554). Even though we are aware that there are contradictory theories, some that favour some sort of lawful determinism and others that favour human freedom (Kristiansen 2004), many archaeologists have accepted as fact that reality is a combination of freedom and determinism and both can be understood by a combination of methods. From a methodological point of view, the contrast between determinism and particularism is what Robert Dunnell asserts is a difference between space-like and timelike frames of research with the former being associated to “how” questions and the latter with “why” questions (1982). In space-like frames of research reality is taken to be a bounded homogenous system. Quantity is an essential feature as is the existence of objects. Furthermore, in space-like frames of research, phenomena are largely considered as timeless in that it is irrelevant if a certain phenomenon occurred yesterday or 3000 years ago because what is of interest are the mechanisms that make these empirical phenomena occur. Underlying this type of research is the search for how things work rather than why things occurred. The opposite is true of time-like frames of research. Scholars following this tradition assume that reality is not necessarily an enclosed and bounded system but one where antecedent conditions are never the same and that all phenomena are a continuation through time. Explanations that follow these principles are historical in their majority (Dunnell 1982, 7–8). However, we need to distinguish two very different ideas concerning causes and history: first, the idea that history is conditioned by laws of nature, and second, the idea that history identifies those laws of nature. Thus,

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there are three main views that can be supported, 1) the view that laws condition all existence which means that history relies on and identifies laws of nature, 2) that laws condition all existence and history is possible because of laws of nature but its aim is not the identification of laws of nature, and 3) laws do not constrain everything and history does not rely on or identify laws of nature. Regarding this issue, there are two philosophers of science that are of interest to us: Carl Hempel and Karl Popper. For Hempel, not only was history subject to universal conditions qua laws of nature but these universal conditions have an analogous function in history and in the empirical sciences (Hempel 1942). Popper, on the other hand, assumes that history is conditioned by laws but he does not condone subsuming history to the same methodology of the natural sciences because unlike these, history’s objective is interpretation and description. So for Popper, history begins with a deduction (“a prognosis”) from a general law but unlike the natural sciences, historians assume those laws to be inherently true and not something that should be investigated on their own (Popper 1960). Popper’s explanation is actually quite attractive because even though he subscribes to laws as an ontological foundation, he is aware that there are indeed different ways, many of them adequate, of describing reality. This might be the immediate appeal of Karl Popper, the fact that his focus was on actual scientific methodology whereas scholars like Hempel, who came out of the Vienna Circle, were more concerned with the syntax of explanatory sentences (Hacohen 2004). So how are the sciences divided according to Popper? First, there is what he calls the “generalizing sciences”, which includes physics, biology, and sociology, and are interested in identifying universal laws and hypotheses. Similar to the general sciences, are the “applied sciences” like engineering, but unlike the former, the applied sciences are not concerned directly with the process of identification of laws per se but their applicability. For instance, while building a bridge, one is interested more on whether the bridge can support a certain load. The law is taken for granted and construction of the bridge is not an actual process of testing the

law. Finally, there are scholars who are interested in understanding particular events. These events however, are supported by initial conditions and laws but unlike the case of the general and applied sciences, these laws are trivial and assumed to be true. These are what Popper calls the historical sciences (1947, 250). So what we have in archaeology is an ontology ruled by laws of nature but which can also, at times, follow accidental sequences. For the empirical scientists, the identification of the law is what provides the true form of scientific explanation (erklären), while history merely describes conditions, and thus, cannot explain at all. Thus, we have laws of nature, described through the causal mode; we have the conditions, described through the narrative mode; and we have a third element which has not been evoked so far: human reasons to act, i.e. teleological reasons. This is where things get considerably more complex: when the question of drunkenness is posed in the following way “why are you drunk?” the answer cannot be provided by the empirical sciences because the question purports not to the cause of drunkenness in general but the specific reason why someone chose to drink. Traditionally, reasons are associated not to scientific explanations but to understanding (verstehen) and although reasons were, during a time, seen as something to be understood under psychological sciences (Descombes 2001, 30), positivists also believed that reasons could be subsumed under a causal mode of description – by seeing human reasons not as the result of actual choices made by people but as actions which are under an effect (Descombes 2001, 33) of what Dunnell has described as a system “(…) where antecedent conditions are never the same and (…) all phenomena are a continuation through time” (1982, 8). The best example of this can be found in the use of agency theory in archaeology – where teleological choices are seen as initiated by agency. So basically, according to the nomothetists, all scientific explanation can be subsumed under empirical approaches – even human teleological behaviour as long as we see that behaviour as a response to previous causal antecedents. However, not everyone agrees with this view, and as we shall see below, the


causal mode of description encounters several obstacles when trying to provide reasons for why people act.

2.3 causal necessity and identitary logic Menger pointed out, quite astutely, that the empirical assumptions which are used to support the principle of laws, require an unempirical assumption: that observations of a specific phenomenon must be valid for similar phenomena. If it is observed that phenomenon a leads unavoidably to phenomenon b, then everything that can be classified as a will necessarily lead to b (Menger 1985, footnote 144). What this means is that laws are intricately linked to the idea that nature is uniform: that what happens to a certain object might happen to another similar object (Hume 1975 [1748], 36). The fact that we can talk about similar objects is quite important because studies in metaphysics (Cameron 2010; Horgan/Potrč 2000; 2008) and quantum physics (Jaeger 2010; 2014) are currently questioning this most basic assumption. If we take Hume’s notion of causation as “an object, followed by another, and where all the objects similar to the first are followed by objects similar to the second (Hume 1975 [1748], 76) we are automatically subscribing to a certain logic regarding “objects”. The only possible way that Hume’s causation is possible is if, as a society, we agree on what constitutes a well-defined object. The idea of ‘well-defined object’ is linked to the existence of society because without the capacity to identify objects fully distinct from another, society and language would not exist (Castoriadis 1984, 209). The reality of welldefined objects is what metaphysicians like Terence Horgan and Matjaž Potrč are currently fighting against and what quantum physics seems to be undermining: there is another side to reality that might not in fact be as determinate. Cornelius Castoriadis made similar argument in the 1970’s and 1980’s: there is metaphysical prejudice towards determinate objects (1984, 1987, 1997). Causation needs

determinate objects because without determinate objects, the whole idea of causation becomes incoherent. For instance, if we say that b follows a, there has to be a logic in which b cannot be anything else other than b. Moreover, Horgan and Potrč have argued that given sorites type paradoxes, objects are never stable (2008, 21ff.). A sorites paradox can be understood in the following analogy: a beard cannot grow in a single day, therefore if I have just shaved and I ask if I have a beard, people would have to say that no, I do not have a beard. If I continue asking the question “do I have a beard?” every single day, the answer would always have to be negative because beards cannot grow in a day. What this analogy illustrates is that there is no exact moment in time where one can say a beard has become a beard. All putative objects are subject to sorites type paradoxes because if we were to ask when a cellphone was made, when a baby was born, when a child becomes an adult, there is never a precise moment in time when these objects come into being. This has led Horgan and Potrč to the conclusion that the only true determinate object is the universe in its entirety (2000, 2008). This ontological stance is known as existence monism (Schaffer 2007). Is it possible that the putative ‘objects’ we believe exist are not actual metaphysical objects? This question can never be answered coherently because it will always depend on what we categorize as objects. Most animal, including humans, have the capacity to discriminate different things – it is a biologically essential that we be able to notice a bear as something distinct from the background or an island from the sea. This capacity however, does not automatically mean that we ‘know’ what objects are since ‘knowing’ is not a biological capacity but a linguistic qua social capacity (Sellars 1991, 160–161, Kusch 2002). This means that it technically does not make sense to say, for instance, that a dog knows its owner in the same way that a student knows Latin because that would imply that a dog is familiar with concept of ‘knowledge’ and/or the concept of ‘ownership’. It is in this perspective that we must question what it means to know what objects are. Castoriadis states:

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“(…) objects must be capable of being assembled into 'collections' forming 'wholes', that it is say into new 'objects' of a superior type. This implies in turn a continual capacity to make distinctions or to act as if one were possessed of that capacity; it implies an ability, that is to say, a kind that allows everything at which one ‘directs one’s sights' to be adequately and sufficiently designated by means of speech for it to 'enter the sights’ of others. One must always be able to 'form a collective whole', at least in speech, and also, obviously, to perform the reverse operation and to decompose a given 'whole' into 'wholes' of a lower order or into distinct and defined 'elements'.” (Castoriadis 1984, 209). This capacity that Castoriadis speaks of is not a biological capacity stricto sensu but rather an agreement to follow certain rules when addressing objects. These rules are known since Aristotle and have been termed the laws of thought (Boole 1854). Traditionally, these laws are three and are recognized as the law of identity, the law of contradiction, and the law of excluded middle. These laws are fundamental for logic, mathematics, and for discourse to be possible. The law of identity states that an object must be equal to itself and different from another, or that for any proposition p, it is impossible for both p and not p to be true; the law of contradiction states that contradictory propositions cannot both be true and false at the same time; and the law of excluded middle states that for any proposition, either it is true or its negation is true. To simplify, the law of identity would mean that a cell phone is a cell phone and not something else, the law of contradiction means that if I say the cell phone is a cell phone, I cannot also say that the cell phone is not a cell phone as that would lead to contradiction, and finally, the law of excluded middle rejects the idea that there is a middle ground between contradictory statements, or in other words, a cell phone is a cell phone or it is not, it cannot be a cell phone and something else. Since the ancient Greeks, the notion of being is intimately linked to this idea of determinateness. Being must be something that is well-defined and easily identifiable. All consid-

erations that are deemed empirical must necessarily be posited on this logic. As an example, an ontology of things (Olsen 2010) in archaeology must be an ontology of things that are identifiable and relational ontologies (Watts 2013) must rely on the fact that relations must be between things that are easily discernible. This logic between the thing and non-thing is an essential element of western culture and is also known as identitary logic (Castoriadis 1987, 221). Both inductive and deductive logic requires identitary logic because without this logic to organize our perception of the world, one simply cannot extend inferences from one observation to another. Therefore, every law of nature presupposes laws of thought. Identitary logic is fundamental to the causal mode of description but not only that, identitary logic is an inalienable element of mathematics and quantification (Boole 1854; Whitehead/ Russell 1910, 19271a, 1927b), namely settheoretical logic (Castoriadis 1987). Ultimately, to continue pursuing the arguments set out in this chapter, the differences between the ways one can perform science lies at the interface of how we believe these putative objects interrelate with one another. The relevance of set-theoretical logic to understanding causation might not be immediately obvious but it seems undeniable that the causal mode of description and quantitative logic operate under the same principles. Mathematics, unlike the empirical sciences, does not require inductive logic and cannot be subsumed under the idea of causality. Nevertheless, both mathematics and the empirical sciences assume that their objects, imagined or otherwise, are determinate since both mathematics and the empirical sciences presuppose the laws of thought qua identitary logic. This means that we can understand, to a certain extent, the empirical sciences and its causal description through mathematical terms. For instance, let us imagine that a study of suicide rates demonstrates that one of the greatest factors that contributes to a rise in suicides are economic recessions. Regardless of whether this is a universal claim or a statistical one, if we follow Humean logic it can be stated that recessions cause suicide. For this argument to be acceptable, one must automatically


assume that there is an object termed “recession” which is distinct from other objects because without this object, the cause in this case is simply not intelligible. Therefore, one can conceive recessions as a mathematical set. Georg Cantor states that a set “(…) is a collection into a whole of defined and distinct objects of our intuition” (cited in Castoriadis 1984, 208). So for instance, there are recessions and then there is the set which contains those recessions and recognizes those recessions not as historically particular instances but as forming a whole. This idea can be represented in set-theoretical logic in the following way: [recessions 1, recession 2, recessions 3,…] or [x: x is a recession]. To return now to the bigger picture: the social sciences and history also operate to a large extent according to the laws of thought, however, not all traditions within the social sciences and history actually follow the causal mode of description because they do not always subscribe to the idea of extending inferences from one object to another. For a historian that is presenting a narrative description of a particular recession, at no point is there any presupposition that what is being said of that recession in particular can be said of recessions in general. For the historian, the objective of looking into the particular is not merely an interest in describing events as particular (Popper 1960, 146) but lies in the fact that some things simply cannot be said of collective wholes like the set [x:x is a recession] because one cannot simply lump all recessions together. Each recession is the result of its own particular history so what can be said of one cannot be said of another. This is the difference that lies in stating “recessions cause suicides” (present tense) and “this recession caused suicides” (past tense). In the first case, the present tense assumes that it is not just a single recessions that causes suicides but recessions in general, whereas the use of the past tense in the second case concerns only one specific recessions without the assumption that other recessions cause suicide. This might be a small difference but it is an essential one because in the first case lies the assumption that there is a collective set called “recessions” which, as a whole, can produce an effect. In the second case, no such object exists.

When it comes to understanding the ‘social’ stricto sensu, there are two aspects of identitary logic which limit that understanding: that everything social is determinate and that everything social is quantifiable. When we qualify something as social, we are referring explicitly to something that makes sense within a social context. Playing the guitar for instance, is something that is not determinate in that understanding why someone plays the guitar is irreducible to determinate objects. As Charles Taylor claims, the basic element needed to identify a teleological action like wanting to play a guitar cannot be reduced to the evidence required by the atomistic statements of the empirical sciences and that is why teleological actions are usually associated with holistic stances (1964, 12). To wit, understanding why someone chooses to do something requires more than just identifying a sequence of causes and effects, it requires understanding the context in which it would make sense to want to do something, a context that is fundamentally historical.

2.4 institutions of mean ing and object relations The causal mode of description and the narrative mode of description follow different types of logic and we can see that logic in the drunk man example. If the causal mode aims at identifying the necessary “cause” behind being drunk (degradation of ethanol in the body), the narrative mode aims at identifying not just the physical conditions but also the social context in which getting drunk is something that is intelligible. The causal mode relies on the determinateness of all the elements necessary for humans to get drunk and this is only possible because all these elements can be conceived quantitatively, i.e. one case of drunkenness is identical to other cases of drunkenness. The narrative mode works with both determinate and indeterminate objects. For instance, if a drunk man justifies his drunkenness by stating that he had been at a party, there is no causal relation between parties and drinking. One can show up at a party

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and not drink at all so the party is not actually what caused the drunkenness in question. Furthermore, there are parties that have no alcohol at all. There are religious groups that do not allow the consumption of alcohol yet these religious groups do not forbid parties from occurring. There are also parties for young children where drinking alcohol is not recommended. Yet stating that one was at a party would be satisfactory to many people as an explanation as to why someone got drunk. The explanation “I was at a party” is a satisfactory answer because it is understood why people drink at parties. Parties of a certain sort are seen as good places where drinking is not only allowed but condoned. Parties can be conceived as either determinate objects or indeterminate objects. If they are conceived as determinate, one can, with a certain degree of confidence, quantify parties and instances of drunkenness. For instance, sociologists could be able to establish a correlation between the number of parties occurring on a given day with incidences of alcohol poisoning on the same day. This correlation however, would not actually mean that parties cause drunkenness per se. However, the relation between parties and alcohol consumption is one that cannot be captured to its full extent if parties are viewed as determinate objects and consequently, through the causal mode of description because a party is also an indeterminate object. Parties can be described causally but something is lost in the process, in fact, one could say that describing a party from a causal perspective would dehumanize the party. The reason why this is so is because parties are better understood from a social and historical perspective. When a person decides to join a party and engage in all the activities that a party entails, one is intentionally agreeing to something. This agreement is not a formal contract but it is an agreement nonetheless because the behaviours that a party entails must be understood between those who have showed up at the party and those who have not. Essential to understanding what ‘party’ means are the historical and social contexts in which it makes sense to go to parties. Vincent Descombes, based on a comment by Peter Geach (1980, 81) develops an interesting

thought experiment to illustrate this idea: imagine a cro-magnon man is suddenly struck by lightning which alters his neuronal state to that of a man that wants to go to the bank. Can the cro-magnon man understand this thought? Can he act upon it (Descombes 2001, 228)? For Descombes, this thought-experiment is to demonstrate that social facts have nothing to do with a person’s neuronal state and that the brain, no matter what its state, cannot make you want to go to the bank. The only way a person is capable of wanting to go to the bank is if that person is within a context where it would make sense to want to go the bank, a context where economic transactions occur, where funds can be deposited, where currencies can be exchanged, where loans can be requested, etc., a context that can only be understood historically. This is what Descombes calls the principle of narrative intelligibility (2001, 182–183, 187, 227, 231). It is easy to see why such an idea is essential to archaeology. While parties and banks might not be of immediate concern to archaeologists, finding a burial laden with grave goods might be indicative of much more than mere causal powers. For instance, it can be asked whether the buried person actually owned the inhumed goods or if they were owned by the community and were only attributed to people after their death. Questions of this sort cannot be answered by general theories, it is only by understanding the historical and social conditions in which it would make sense to either be buried with goods one possessed during life or be buried with goods that are attributed after death. It is also easy to understand why ‘objects’ like parties and banks are indeterminate. A party can be conceived as a concrete object but it is what it means to a given set of people that matters. A party is a whole that cannot be reduced to the physical objects to which they are customarily associated. For instance, if we were to reduce the elements of a party to a mathematical set it would look like something of the sort: [beer 1, beer 2, beer 3, song 1, song 2, song 3, Peter, Mary, John,…] but all these objects within the set do not form a party. As stated before, a party might not necessarily have beer nor music so it is not the elements themselves that together makes a party.


This means, that social institutions like banks, rituals, parties derive their meaning not from the objects that compose them. Ian Hodder has recently argued that humans form relationships with things (2011, 2012). For Hodder, humans and things are entangled in dependencies, in which humans depend on things, things depend on humans, human depend on humans, and things depend on things (2012, 88). While this idea is interesting, Hodder’s entanglement theory is a departure from his earlier work which focused more on the idea of meaning and society (1982a, 1985, 1991). This ‘return to things’ has become widespread in archaeology (Domanska 2006a, 2006b; Olsen 2003, 2007, 2010; Olsen et al. 2012; Webmoor/Witmore 2008; Witmore 2014) but I find that it is based on an artificial separation of the material, which has been elided with phenomenological experience, (Olsen 2003, 96ff; Olsen 2010, chapter 4, 2012, 23), and the immaterial which has been elided with notions of meaning and hermeneutic and semiotic approaches which decipher these meanings. The idea that these two views are incompatible is a false one, in that there is no phenomenological experience that is not dependent on a conscious intention towards an object, and alternatively, there is also no hermeneutic interpretation that is not experiential. If phenomenology is nothing more than pure unmediated experience, then humans are nothing more than potatoes that passively take in unfiltered sensory input. As Michael Oakeshott has reasonably argued, experience is modal in that it automatically interprets (2015 [1933]). Besides Oakeshott, there have been other scholars that have emphasized that our relation to the world is both direct unmediated experience (sensu Dreyfus/Taylor 2015) and interpretative (e.g. Descombes 2014). By abolishing the material/immaterial dichotomy, archaeology would not need to be either phenomenological or hermeneutic (Descombes 1986, 67ff.). Furthermore, it is quite disconcerting that this focus on the material and on things has done very little in clarifying the notion of ‘social’. When it is claimed that humans depend on things (Hodder 2012, 38; Webmoor/Witmore 2008), there is no clear

explanation on why the relation between humans and things is social. First of all, what defines a thing? Hodder is not clear about this since in one essay he states that some things are “made by humans – artefacts or material culture – or things interfered with by humans, such as domesticated plants and animals” (2011, 157) and in another essay he states that “all things are to some degree human-made artifacts” (2012, 4). This is quite confusing since it fails to consider the role of the quantum realm and the universe beyond earth which also have a bearing on human affairs. Moreover, if ‘everything’ (the sunlight, rivers, mountains, ecosystems) are things, would that not mean that everything is dependent on everything? This seems to be the underlying logic of Hodder’s entanglement theory. As humans, we cannot survive without oxygen so there is a dependency of the thing (human) on another thing (oxygen). Oxygen is one of the most predominant elements in the universe so it would be incorrect to assume that oxygen exists merely for the sake of our survival. If oxygen is such a ubiquitous element, could it not be claimed that the universe, in its entirety, depends on oxygen? The idea I am trying to convey is that Hodder’s entanglement theory sounds much more like a general philosophy of everything (e.g. monism, vitalism, panmaterialism) than it does a theory aimed at understanding humans, societies, or even objects and things. This shift to things is an interesting one but I believe it to be misguided. If the arguments I have made above are correct, one thing is certain: social life is definitely not an entanglement of humans and things, rather this entanglement is an a posteriori way of describing societies but not its raison d’être. In short, if archaeology aims at studying past societies through archaeological methods, then this ‘turn’ to things might not be adequate. For instance, let us imagine a society as a composition of humans and things, from a set-theoretical perspective this would look like [John, pencil, Mary, Peter, cup, chair,…] so basically a set that contains all the putative elements necessary for a society to function. Intuitively, it would seem acceptable that once we have all the elements necessary for a society to function – a society is formed – but this logic falls apart the moment we ask the ques-

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tion “how many of those elements are necessary to form a society?” 1? 35? 2500? This question seems trivial at first but it is an important one because if societies are based on objects, one could arguably contend that there must be a minimum number of objects necessary to form a society. Let us pursue this argument by asking another question “can a society be formed by one human?” Can individual humans, stranded on islands, form a society of their own? If we think of societies as aggregates of human + objects then yes, a human on a deserted island can indeed form a society. This however, reduces the notion of society to such a basic conception that virtually anything and everything could qualify as a society. A person sitting alone in an office could be a society of its own, as could a baby holding a spoon. So looking at societies in terms of what things it comprises drags the understanding of society into the wrong direction. This is where I find current social ontologies to be incredibly lacking: by thinking of society in terms of relations of humans and things, they have left open the possibility that a society can be composed of a single person. If it is contended that a society can indeed be composed of a single person, or a single person and a single object, or a single object and another single object, we are left with a definition of society that is completely meaningless which is why the idea of society cannot be found in humans, objects, things, and the relations of these among themselves. To understand society, one needs an agreement, i.e. an institution of a meaning (Descombes 2014). In a simplified definition, an institution of meaning is the outcome when at least two people agree on what it means to behave in a certain way. This is not however, like Hobbes’ or Rousseau’s notion of Social Contract in that it is not an agreement to work together towards a common goal. For society and all its institutions to exist, there needs to be an understanding of certain rules (Taylor 2004, 205). In Wittgenstein’s later philosophy this is known as an agreement through action (Williams 2010, 208). An agreement through action means that you agree not by conceding a point, nor by shaking hands, nor by signing a contract, but by simply doing what is cus-

tomary or habitual. Therefore, an institution is not posited on interpretation nor meaning per se but on how to act in specific situations. For instance, the colours one sees in traffic lights (red, yellow, and green) are not something that is “interpreted” but something that is simply acted upon when driving. It is only by actually following the rules at the traffic lights that it is possible to say that someone understands the meaning of the colours of traffic lights. So when a person states that she knows what the colours at the traffic light mean, she is saying that she knows when the light is red she must stop the car and start/ continue driving when the light is green she can continue driving. In themselves, the green, red, and yellow have no ‘meaning’, what they do have is a behaviour associated to them. Similarly, when one is lost one can follow a map but it is not what a map means that is important but what the map tells you. An agreement is not about knowing, it is about acting. Agreements are something that occur naïvely in that it is only on rare occasions that agreements are established before any action takes place. Just like two children, who upon playing with each other create rules for a game, individuals across time and space have created rules for themselves (Oakeshott 1991 [1962], 151). This idea of naivety is important as it overrules the idea that some human, at some point in our past must have been the first social being. Trying to identify when humans first became ‘social’ is a pointless objective because the use of the qualifier ‘social’ is something that came many years after humans first became social. The term ‘society’ is used retrospectively in the same way that the designations “Palaeolithic” and “Neolithic” could only have been used after these periods had passed. Asking when or where humans became social would be like asking when or where did the Palaeolithic start. The most important point so far is that societies are not aggregates of people but agreements qua institutions. If I were to gather 5000 random people together, there is no reason to believe they would become a society in the same way that a random group of 5000 people does not form an army or a university. So what forms an army or a university? Is it the build-


ings, the uniforms, the weapons? Is it by simply conflating an army with the material elements that compose them? Once again, if this were indeed the case one could represent an army as [man, gun, uniform, man, gun, uniform, man, gun, uniform,…] and a university as [canteen, administration office, laboratory, microscope, student 1, professor 1, professor 2, student 2,…], or in other words, merely as an aggregate of unrelated things. Armies and universities are irreducible to its components which means that these institutions are object of their own, albeit indeterminate ones. The standard forms of empirical enquiry are limited in providing explanations of social action because this action does not conform to any causal principle stricto sensu. Simply put, there is no cause for a person wanting to go to a party or to the bank. So to understand parties and banks, one cannot look at humans and/or objects per se, because banks and parties originated in specific historical conditions. If information about banks and parties could be found among humans, objects, or relations between both, then we could understand also banks and parties by observing the relations between objects and people in a native society from New Guinea or a European Bronze Age society. Dancing is a good example of the limitations of empirical approaches. While one can, for instance, quantify how many people are dancing on a Saturday night in New York, the number itself provides hardly any information on why people are dancing in the first place. Furthermore, analysing the act of dancing through the musculature or the brains of the dancers would also not answer the why-question as that would be like trying to understand why people use money by observing banknotes under a microscope (Noë 2009, 3). To understand dancing, one must understand the historical situation in which it would make sense to dance. So moving your body in certain ways, in certain locations, and during certain times, is something that comes out of an agreement through action. As was stated before, the causal mode of description can nevertheless be applied to social situations depending on what questions are being asked, in fact, most sociological studies follow causal modes of description. A

good example of this are studies of suicide in the armed forces and how the access of firearms can affect suicides (Helmkamp 1996; Mahon et al. 2014). These types of study, while essential, are of course limited because they establish a somewhat narrow frame of causality. Even when these do include a very wide range of parameters, they still tend to point to a ‘cause’ or even ‘several causes’. In these studies, the establishment of a cause is based on a correlation between the time spent with firearms and the rate of suicide, which means that a temporary solution to the problem of suicides in the armed forces would be to reduce the amount of time when a soldier is responsible for a firearm. This correlation follows the basic assumption that guns cause suicide, in that guns are a large factor that contributes to the high rate of suicides. Given their applicability and insight, one cannot dismiss this type of sociological and psychological enquiry. We are however, left with the question of why there is such a high incidence of suicide in the armed forces in the first place. Once again, the causal mode of description could indeed pinpoint causes like alienation or depression, but we can continue with questions: why do members of the armed forces struggle with alienation and depression? Ultimately, the history of how specific armed forces developed through time, or the history of the soldiers in question, or the history of firearms, provide the context we need to understand why so many soldiers kill themselves. While it is true that the reconstruction of such a history might not contribute a solution to the problem, it nonetheless provides a deeper understanding of the problem, one that goes beyond the simple logic of cause and effect. In archaeology, this type of sociological enquiry loses much of its meaning given the lack of a pragmatic use of the information provided. Furthermore, this type of study fails to capture the idea of society in the way I have described above. These studies are sociological in that they address issues faced by society, but their form of enquiry is not one intended for the study of what is actually ‘social’ about societies. The topic of society, guns, and violence is a relevant one and while I cannot say to know much about the issue, I believe that its understanding depends on more than just capturing

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the interaction between the determinate objects that are caught in gun-related crimes or incidents. In the US, given the high-incidence of gun-related crimes, there has been a dispute between those that argue that “guns kill people” and those that argue that “people kill people”. As Bruno Latour has noted, the NRA make the claim that guns themselves can do nothing, it is people that kill people and guns are merely passive tools that aid in the process of killing (1999, 177). In the suicide case-studies addressed above, the correlation between guns and suicides has led to an assumption of causation: guns kill people. The solution in this situation is to remove the offending causal element: guns. But if people kill people, there really is no direct pragmatic solution as one cannot simply “remove” people. As Latour and Gell point out, understanding these situations requires much more than the establishment of these simple cause-effect principles. Thinking about lethal firearms and killing must follow the actions of just not the human agent but the non-human agent, in this case, the human and firearm together (Gell 1998, 20–21; Latour 1999, 177ff.). While I find this to be acceptable, I believe there is a point that Latour has barely addressed which concerns the role of history. Let us look at this issue through the following question: why can an agent (human) and another agent (gun) shoot a third agent (human) in the twenty-first century and not in the third millennium BC? The answer to this question cannot be found in understanding the metaphysics behind agency, nor can it be found by understanding the intricate plots in which Latour describes the situations of a gunman (1999, 178ff.). Morevoer, I could confront Latour’s interpretation of the gunman situation by claiming that in the past, even before we were modern anatomical humans, killing must have relied quite regularly on brute force and not on objects – and in these cases, there is no non-human agent (gun, sword, stone axe, club) aiding us in the killing project. To this, Latour would argue that this is not relevant today because today we have a rather large assortment of objects/agents that aids us in killing so we cannot think of today as if it were 3 or 4 million years ago (1999, 190). If this is true, then can it not be argued that the history from

the first anthropoids to modern anatomical humans is essential to understanding why we today can shoot another person? Latour gives little importance to this detail but it is a detail that cannot be dismissed. A person + gun can shoot another person but people and guns do not come out of nothing. Agency does not have the power to create people and guns out of thin air so regardless of whether it is people that kill people, guns that kill people, people + guns that kill people, there still needs to be a historical context that allows this to occur. That is why when we find a burial dated to the eleventh century, no one suggests that the death was due to a gunshot wound because historically, such a situation could simply not be possible. Furthermore, like Hodder, Latour represents these connections between human and non-human agents in the following way “H-NH-H-NH-NH-NH-H-H-H-H-NH (where H stands for a human-like actant and NH for a non-human)” (Latour 1991, 110) or in Hodder’s case “(HT) + (TT) + (TH) + (HH)” (HT stands for human-thing interdependence, and TT stand for thing-thing interdependence) (Hodder 2012, 88). In both these representations the description of the chain or entanglement do not actually reflect any causal situation as they are an a posteriori representation of how societies are in a frozen moment in time. As stated above, the aggregation of humans and non-humans does not itself produce anything, they are the outcome of social relations not the cause or the reason for them. Just as one cannot make a soldier by giving a random person a gun and uniform, one does not stop being a soldier if the gun or uniform is taken away. Therefore, what it means to be a soldier has to transcend the logic of object aggregation. This is not to say that seeing social relations in terms of networks between different things is not advantageous in specific cases. What these networks do not do however, is provide a more in-depth understanding of why societies developed the way they did. This is because these approaches focus on ‘material things’ instead of their history. For example, Hodder asks us to imagine the 8000 year old Mesolithic site of Lepenski Vir:


“But we can do something subversive – put in an object that does not fit. This is absurd. A concert piano? Suddenly the things, including the piano, force us to look at them more carefully. Why is a piano so absurdly out of place in Lepenski Vir? We look at the piano. It looks like those played in symphony halls, it requires highly specialized skills to play, it is based on a specific western 12-tonal system, it uses a cast iron frame and high-tension wire that only became available in the Industrial Revolution. The grand piano needs symphony halls, it needs years of practice by trained musicians, it needs the system of tones in music, it needs factories able to pour precision iron. The people in the image could not understand, hear, make a grand piano. They did not have the factories, ships to import the materials, the imperial reach, the organization of labor, or the ideas about music that made the piano possible. So, subversively and subtly, the focus has changed from how things make society possible to the thing itself and its multiple connections. The gaze shifts to look more closely, harder at the thing, to explore how society and thing are co-entangled.” (Hodder 2012, 3). Hodder’s example of the piano in Lepenski Vir does not make us think solely about objects but also about anachronism (Hodder 2012, 5). In fact, as Hodder’s quote shows, what makes this situation so improbable has nothing to do with objects themselves but with the history that simply could not have allowed pianos to exist 8000 years ago. Given this undeniable truth, Hodder has turned to evolutionary theory in order to justify how things develop through time (2012, chapter 7). Even though Hodder has recognized this dependency on temporal explanation, he nevertheless remains adamant that humans depend on

things, even though this dependency is something that cannot exist outside of history itself. Imagine that a film is produced based on the lives of the people that lived in Lepenski Vir. Putting a piano in the film would seem, as Hodder points out, very out of place. But what if we had the people talking in Latin or Japanese? Would that not also seem out of place? While speech can sometimes involve objects like phones, megaphones, speech halls, etc. most of the time, speech is not dependent on any physical object. Just like discourse, a piano is the result of social interaction but in and of itself, the piano tells us nothing because it is an individuated well-defined determinate object. Removing the piano out of Lepenski Vir and putting it in a concert hall would still make it meaningless because we are lacking a historical context, a context that Hodder has alluded to in the quote above: “The grand piano needs symphony halls, it needs years of practice by trained musicians, it needs the system of tones in music, it needs factories able to pour precision iron”. In gist, a piano cannot be reduced to being an object, it has to have a story. In conclusion, understanding why someone is drunk, why a piano is at Lepenski Vir, why a cro-magnon man wants to go to the bank, requires understanding the historical and social context in which it makes sense to be drunk, have a piano, and want to go to the bank. These contexts are irreducible to the objects they comprise in that a party is not a network relation or a mere aggregation of objects, nor is playing the piano something that can be reduced to person + piano. A society must comprise what Descombes has described as institutions of meaning. These institutions are historically conditioned in that someone can only want to drink, play the piano, or play a game of chess, if there is a context in which these actions are understood.

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3 the ir r e du c i b il i t y o f s oc ia l act i on

3.1 homo sociologicus In the previous chapter I argued that the causal mode of description, while applicable to social contexts, is limited in that it cannot provide an explanation of the context in which a certain action makes sense. Going to a party cannot be fully explained through the causal mode because going to a party is something that only makes sense to people who know what it means to go to a party. Even if somehow it was discovered that there is a biological element that makes all humans want to attend party-like events, understanding why parties can be so different in their characteristics from culture to culture would still remain incomprehensible. The argument therefore is not whether there is a cause for parties to occur universally across all cultures but whether thinking of them from a causal point-of-view is adequate. Avoiding the causal point-of-view would imply relying on other forms of description, ones that do not necessarily see causes as ultimately essential to the understanding of certain phenomena. In positivist philosophy of science, the notion of cause was the figurehead of most of arguments that defended methodological monism, i.e. an inferential method that is both valid for the empirical sciences as for the social sciences. The idea that both the empirical and social contexts could be studied under the same inferential principles tends to be associated to Mill, Carnap, and Hempel (Descombes 2004, 269) but it remains strong to this day through the work of scientists who aim at reducing everything to the natural order. This type of scientific reasoning is, in other words, what Slavoj Žižek calls the ‘vulgar’ materialism of the empirical sciences (2014, 5). The empirical sciences holds a rather prestigious place in

western society nowadays – a clear demonstration of this fact comes from the crude debate between the atheists and the theists, where atheists often rely on empirical science to support their arguments. The atheists could also rely on history, philosophy, and ethics, in their arguments but arguments originating from the empirical sciences seem to have a stronger effect. The empirical sciences obviously have their role in modern society, a role that no sane person can deny. One simply cannot object that the knowledge obtained in cancer research or structural engineering is inconsequential. What can be contended however, is its usefulness in studying social action. As stated in the previous chapter, the claim that human societies require a different form of description lies not in any inherent metaphysical difference between humans and everything else. Thinking that humans are somehow inherently different can be quite problematic because of what it entails metaphysically and/or empirically. When we ask the question “what is it that humans have that makes them different?” the use of the verb ‘to have’ has already tilted the question in an unfortunate direction because humans do not have anything that makes them metaphysically different. Let us look at this in following way: a human can grab a branch because it has opposable thumbs but a human does not have strength because of strength-ness. In the first description, it makes sense to say someone has thumbs, in that a human does in fact have thumbs but in the second description it is nonsensical to say that someone is strong because he or she has strength-ness because there is nothing inherent to humans that provide them with strength. So looking at a human, one can empirically

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confirm the presence of thumbs, but looking at a person does not tell us if the human has strength. So what is it that allows us to say someone has strength? A person needs to effectively demonstrate their strength by fighting, lifting something heavy, going many days without rest, etc. It is the witnessing of feats of strength that substantiates the qualifier ‘strong’. Similarly, knowing how to use computers does not mean I have within myself something that makes me different from someone who does not know how to use computers. As Martin Kusch has argued, knowing something does not imply any ownership, knowing something is a social status not unlike being a head of department (2002, 1). Therefore, knowing how to use a computer does not entail having computer-ness. Naturally, humans are indeed different from other things or else there would be no use for the concept of ‘human’. These differences can be seen in two distinct ways: empirically, we have a certain type of skin, a certain type of eyesight, a certain way of moving, and so on. In this sense a human is different from bear, just as a bear is different from a butterfly, and butterfly is different from a mollusc. From a social point-of-view, being a human does not depend on some innate biological capacity (Thomas 1996, 16). I will not deny that our capacities in social life are not somehow dependent on our innate cognitive abilities. What I will deny is that social statuses are dependent on cognitive abilities. The difference between these two is the difference between seeing things from a causal and from a social point-of-view. Under a causal description, knowing how to use a computer depends on my cognitive capacity to process visual information and send signals that command my body, whereas socially, knowing how to use a computer requires a context where people know what computers are and what ‘knowing how to use computers’ means to them. Now, Anthony Giddens for instance, argues that “[t]o be a human being is to be a purposive agent, who both has reasons for his or her activities and is able, if asked, to elaborate discursively upon those reasons (…)” (1984, 3). Giddens, in a way, is correct in that being what we qualify as human is being a social being. This ‘social-being’ does not have however, a

metaphysical or empirical basis in the same way that being cat owner is not empirically or metaphysically based. It could be objected that being the owner of a cat is indeed empirical or metaphysical because it requires a real relation of property between a human and a cat (Fodor/Lepore 1992, 3) but as Descombes points out, being an owner of a cat requires much more than just the relational property because it is also a status relative to other people – so to be cat owner, there must also be a context in which there are people who do not own that same cat (Descombes 2014, 117). For instance, finding a previously unknown society that has people who dedicate their time to taking care of cats does not lead to the conclusion that these people are cat owners because these cats could be property not of their caretakers, but of the society as a whole. In fact, this society might be completely unaware of the concept of property, i.e. what is mine, and what is thine, which would mean that even though these people have the same exact relational property to cats, they cannot be considered cat owners. If we extend this reasoning to what it means to be a human, we come to the conclusion that a human being is nothing more than a social status that we have imposed upon ourselves, a status that is only intelligible if there are beings that we have qualified as non-human. All actions we commonly ascribe to humans in the capacity of cognitively ‘enlightened’ beings – actions like thinking, hating, loving, in fact, every state we assume belongs to the realm of the mental, is on par – is in the same category – as being the captain of a team, falling behind on your taxes, or being a homeowner (Descombes 2001, 231; Haugeland 2004, 259). The difference between humans and other beings is not one of mental capacities, it is one we have institutionalized. Acting according to an institution of meaning is not a symptom of an underlying power that humans have in the same way that being able to create ant colonies is not a symptom of an underlying power that ants have. Institutions of meaning are not symptoms of anything, they just are. Once this is recognized, it becomes clear why it is incorrect to talk about laws of nature, consciousness, or mind when

3 The irreducibility of social action

it comes to humans as social beings. For instance, the capacity for language is not something that is innate to humans, it is something that simply exists in and of itself and it is only in retrospect that one can say that humans are capable of language. That is why the idea of a universal grammar (Chomsky 2006; Hockett 1958), innate to all humans, is in dire need of retirement (Bergen 2015). The issue of universal grammar lies not in the universalization itself. Things can be universalized or generalized, for instance, one can say that all rubies are red or that all men are mortal. There is nothing wrong with the actual process of universalizing or generalizing – the issue lies in the incorrect perception that common properties imply a common cause for existence. Chomsky’s universal grammar is based on the notion that the “mechanical interactions between atoms behind the ability of elements to combine into compounds, so cognitive science will enable us to see mechanical interactions between nerve cells behind the exercise of social skills” (Rorty 2004, 220). Let us ignore the fact that many of the original elements of Chomsky’s universal grammar have been debunked (Everett 2005) and assume that yes, Chomsky is right in claiming that social interactions are indeed a result of mechanistic processes in nerve cells within the brain – we are still left with the question: are mechanical processes the cause of social interactions? Intuitively, the scientific status quo would demand an affirmative answer to this question but as the drunk man example from the previous chapter has shown, there are at least two separate processes going on simultaneously when someone gets drunk, a chemical one and a social one. Can we argue that of both processes one is a real cause and the other one is not? From a philosophical standpoint, one is a necessary cause (the chemical process of ethanol degradation in the body) and the other is a sufficient condition (having been invited to a party that had alcohol) so it seems that the chemical process is somehow more important.

3.2. t e l e o log i ca l explanations and intentional description One of the things that the defenders of causal description fail to take into account is the variety of why-questions one can ask (Bromberger 1966; Dray 1957, 156ff.), many of which do not require a cause as justification. This does not mean that causes are non-existent, it only means that some questions do not require one as answer. This is an observation that has been made several times with regards to teleological explanation (Taylor 1964; von Wright 1971) where intentionality plays a crucial role. In current scholarship, teleological explanations seem to have fallen out of favour but nevertheless, they are in fact a valid form of explanation. Richard Braithwaite, among many other philosophers, recognized this early on (1955). For Braithwaite, a teleological explanation concerns the activity in which a goal is to be achieved, for instance, when asked why he was staying in Cambridge all through August, he replied “in order to finish a book” (1955, 322). Some might argue that why-questions, which require a teleological answer, should not be subsumed under the purview of scientific research given their seemingly trivial nature (e.g. Salmon 1978, 683). This argument however, loses its strength when we start thinking of teleology in much bigger terms. Why did thousands of people visit South Africa in 2010? Why was there a large turnout in Portugal’s 2015 national elections? Why are so many Syrian refugees headed for Nordic countries? These questions are anything but trivial and they can all be answered with teleological explanations. I do not wish to argue that teleological explanation is the only legitimate way of describing social reality, in fact, I would go so far as to say that teleological explanations alone can barely explain anything. That is why that the causal and teleological explanation are not the only two options when it comes to modes of description: there is still the narrative mode. Unlike the causal mode which aims at identifying the necessary cause or the teleological explanation which provides the intention behind an activity, the narrative mode is

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more flexible in that it sets up the context in which human action can be understood. Returning to the drunk man example – the narrative mode here is what provides the context in which it makes sense to want to drink (teleology) and the context where alcohol is consumed and causes its chemical effect in the body (causal). From an archaeological perspective, it would be sensible to apply all three forms of description when required for there is no real advantage in only applying one form regardless of how adequate it might appear. Therefore, an archaeology that claims itself as a study of past societies should be flexible. I have to nevertheless, point out the crucial importance of history and narrative in providing the understanding of societies. Braithwaite states that the generality of laws are not limited to any particular space and time (1955, 301). Whether this is accurate or not does not diminish the fact that the effects of those laws must occur in a specific space and time – the degradation of ethanol in the body still requires it to enter a body since drunkenness is not something that just contingently happens. Similarly, when thousands of people visited South Africa in 2010 to attend the World Cup, there are historical reasons why such an event attracts that many people. This attraction is not a magnetic attraction: there are historical conditions which provide the sense for people to have hopped onto a plane and flown their way to South Africa in 2010. In a situation of this sort, we cannot rely on causal processes or something that is internal to humans. Wanting to attend the World Cup depends on the existence of the World Cup as an object that is external to cause-effect conjunctions and external to humans, therefore, a teleological explanation requires an intention towards an external object. This means that a link can be established between teleological

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and historical explanations, to wit, if the object of an intention is external, e.g. writing a book, attending the World Cup, and cannot be captured through a cause-effect conjunction, it would mean that understanding intentions requires understanding the external object an object that is specific to a historical period. This differs largely from the assumptions implied in the causal mode of description. If for instance, I suspect that I can create stem cells by dipping red cells in a special solution of acid, it must be assumed that everything that qualifies as a red cell can undergo this same process. This logic is inapplicable to social and historical situations: if the 2010 South Africa World Cup has attracted thousands of people, it does not derive that the same would happen with the 2022 Qatar World Cup. Let me clarify this further: empirical scientists can claim that love is nothing more than chemical process in the brain involving adrenaline, serotonin, and dopamine. Therefore, according to the empirical scientists, love is reducible to a neuronal cause and effect. However, a person cannot simply ‘love’. There is no process in which a person falls into a state of loving-ness or hate-ness. While it is true that chemicals in the brain do affect our personalities and our way of being, in no case do chemicals tell me who or what to love because that process is not internal (brain), it is external in that it depends on what is outside of the brain for it to occur (intentional object). Intentionality is thus something that is directed outside of the subject of the intention and what is intentional cannot be simultaneously internal4 (Brentano 2015 [1874], 92–93; Descombes 2001, 21). As phenomenology has shown, it is the external object itself that is of relevance – for example, fearing a tiger implies a situation where I can be attacked by a real living tiger, not a mental image of one (Taylor 2004, 206). Em-

thesis, also known as Brentano’s thesis, is not entirely clear but it seems that what Brentano was trying to explain concerns how medieval Scholastic philosophy approached intentionality, in which mental phenomena need to have a direction towards an ‘object’. This object is external in that it must be conceived as external to the person who intentionally acts towards it. This means that intentionality cannot be ‘irreal’, intentionality requires the object to exist or have the properties of something that exists (see Brentano 2015 [1874], 92 footnote 10).


pirical scientists could argue that there are chemicals in the brain which induce a state of fear, and in a way these scientists are correct – but why does this effect occur with regards to a tiger and not with a bunny for instance? To argue that it is chemicals that make me feel fear of a tiger is to diminish the role the tiger plays in the process. Thus, to understand from a social point-of-view, one must understand what a tiger, as an external object, represents in today’s society: a dangerous animal. In the previous chapter, I alluded to Vincent Descombes’ thought experiment which places a cro-magnon man in a situation where he wants to go to a bank (2001, 228ff.). Logically, there cannot be a cause for a cro-magnon to want to go to the bank because that depends on an intentional object: banks and the social practices surrounding them. Furthermore, there cannot be a cause for the act of ‘wanting’ because wanting cannot be an action unless there is an object to want. Therefore, it would be incorrect to say that there is a cause (in the brain) to make a person want to go to the bank because the bank simply does not enact that effect. This same principle has to be applied to why people went to the World Cup in South Africa in 2010: there is no cause-effect that can explain such a situation. If the object of intention is external and is not the cause of the intention, why-questions concerning intention cannot be answered by appealing to causes. Philosophers like William Dray and Maurice Mandelbaum were the first philosophers to take note of intentionality and teleological explanations and recognize their importance in history. For instance, in his defence of laws and their function in history, Carl Hempel argued that continual drought forced the Dust Bowl farmers to migrate to California (1942). For him, droughts and migration had a cause-effect relation – with the general hypothesis being that people “will tend to migrate to regions which offer better living conditions” (1942, 41). This specious truism is easily debunked by looking at some of the most inhospitable places on earth and finding human occupation in these places. There is also the issue of how general one wants to be in their explanations because stating that people will tend to migrate if they can access a better life elsewhere is rather vague and unhelpful, a

problem that afflicted archaeology when Hempel’s covering law model was applied, and consequently mocked due to the generality of statements that were produced (Flannery 1973, 51). Nonetheless, the fact that Hempel’s hypothesis is wrong and the fact that it is too general for any real-world insight is not itself the problem. The problem lies in the fact that Hempel could not provide an explanation as to why California, of all places, was the intended destination. William Dray’s critique pointed out that Hempel failed to realize what California meant to the Dust Bowl farmers (1957). Dray’s argument is very important because the moment we think of laws regarding social behaviour, we automatically assume that the meanings of those behaviours have already been interpreted by the actors in question (Apel 1984, xi). This means that there is an inalienable link between history in particular and the social sciences in general: meaning is historically conditioned in that one cannot understand why an intentional actor would want to go to a bank without placing the actor within a narrative which involves the development of banking institutions, a narrative without which the intention cannot be understood (Descombes 2001, 228). Mandelbaum captured this quite well when he stated that “the actual behaviour of specific individuals towards one another is unintelligible unless one views their behaviour in terms of their status and roles, and the concept of status and role are devoid of meaning unless one interprets them in terms of the organization of the society to which the individuals belong” (1959, 479). Mandelbaum was also keen in pointing out that these social concepts should not be assumed to be thoughts but the actual behaviour of the individuals in question (1959, 480). Of these ideas, it is important to recognize that to a large extent what determines how we formulate our explanations depends on what we are actually asking about in the first place. There are several factors involved in why-questions, the main factor being the context in which the question is being asked. When it comes to human societies, why-questions cannot rely on the identification of a common cause because such commons causes simply do not exist, and if they do exist, they are too vague. This is, to a large extent why general

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theories in archaeology should be applied more critically. On one hand, there is no cause per se for humans to behave a certain way so the identification of what it means to be human in and of itself is irrelevant. It is not what it means to be human that is of importance because if one manages to identify such a meaning, it will tell us nothing about the specificity of past societies. Thus, understanding humanity, through the idea of some sort of innate ‘humanness’ might not be the ideal modus operandi. This would also mean ignoring the metaphysics of humanness and all the abstractions that come with speculating on what humans and the world are supposed to be in-themselves.

3.3 the paradox of human freedom The take home message of the previous sub-chapters is that social action is irreducible, in that causes cannot capture the social and historical context in which an intentional action is intelligible. That is not to say that social actions cannot be reduced to cause-effect conjunctions because they can. The problem is, when intentional action is reduced to causal factors, the historical and social properties of the explanation are forfeited. In archaeology, one of the concepts that straddles the line between causality and intentionality is agency. This concept, which has been discussed in archaeology for some decades now (Robb 2010), requires some parsing. Agency is commonly seen as something inherently social, for instance, Marcia-Anne Dobres and John Robb point out that there are four principles to which agency is generally associated: the material conditions of social life; the simultaneously constraining and enabling influence of social, symbolic and material structures and institutions, habituation, and beliefs; the importance of the motivations and actions of agents; and the dialectic structure and agency (2000, 8). Now, as Dobres and Robb also point out, this list of principles does not narrow the concept much which leads to the idea that agency might have several operative qualities

(2000, 9) or even that agency is some dynamic universal property (2005, 160). However, the way in which John Robb has recently described the notion agency has made it virtually synonymous with the above-mentioned notion of intentionality in that “agency must be localized not in a simple, easily expressed abstract goal, but rather in the emergent practical logic of the projects through which this goal is understood, defined and can be pursued” (2010, 499). This means that agency has to be understood holistically, or in other words, in reference to the social context in which the action of an agent makes sense. This also means that being an agent is a social status, not unlike being a captain of a ship or the head of a department. The difference between being an agent and being a head of department is a numerical one in that there are more agents on this planet than there are heads of department. Nevertheless, being an agent is a social status and it must be recognized by the agent himself/herself and by other agents. This is why an agent must be ‘knowledgeable’ (Barrett 2000, 65). Moreover, like intentionality, what matters is not the intentional agent but the context in which a person can be an agent, and thus, the focus is on social constraints and not on social freedom. The ‘freedom’ to act, implied in agency theory, is somewhat paradoxical in that for it to exist, we must be within a constraining society in which this freedom is intelligible (Brandom 2004, 248). If anything, agency, which was conceived with the intention to demonstrate that people are not mere automatons that react to external changes (Dornan 2002, 304), has actually had the exact opposite effect. As Pleasants points out, freedom is always freedom to do something or from something (1997), therefore, one cannot address freedom without also addressing what one is free from. As an example, in the western world, many countries allow people to choose not to follow a religion but this ‘choice’ only exists in virtue of the existence of religious institutions. If these institutions did not exist, one could not be free to choose not to follow a religion. Thus, when it is stated that all individuals have agency, nothing of relevance is being said. What matters are the real world social differences that these agents manifest (Cowgill


2000, 53). However, these real world differences, like that of social status, of prestige, of authority, are concepts which are dependent on elements of the external world, elements which counterfactually might have never existed. This means that agency depends exclusively on a context in which it can be understood (Robb 2004, 105). An agent cannot engage in a social action unless that action is directed, i.e. intentional. Therefore, it is impossible, as some suggest, for agency to be cross-culturally compared (Brumfiel 2000, 249–250) because each strategy, each reproduction, each engagement, is a response to a specific historical environment. In this perspective, there is no ‘agency’ per se, there are specific social contexts in which people can act in specific ways, e.g. writing a book or attending the World Cup. Are there good reasons to subscribe to intentionality instead of agency when both concept are so similar? Yes, because intentionality provides teleological explanations. Intentionality was reinstated as a philosophical concept by Franz Brentano in the late nineteenth century in order to clarify some issues regarding mental philosophy. In the mid-twentieth century onwards, intentionality became intricately associated to teleological explanations in the philosophy of G. E. M. Anscombe (2000 [1957]); Peter Geach (1957); Charles Taylor (1964); and George von Wright (1971). Of these philosophers, Taylor is the only philosopher who considers whether humans and/or animals can be found to be purposive, in other words, if humans and/or animals have intentionality (Taylor 1964, 3–5; 1985, 142). Alternatively, von Wright and Anscombe preferred focusing on the analytical (linguistic) aspects of intentionality, primarily the constitution of intentional descriptions. To these latter philosophers, what mattered was not who or what could exert intentionality. Questions like “[c]an non-human things exert agency?” (Robb 2010, 504) would be anathema to von Wright and Anscombe because there is no correlation between having intentionality or being able to exert intentionality and an intentional description. This means intentionality does not necessarily reflect ontological considerations. For instance, we can think of a tree as something that exists in its own right and as some-

thing that is perceived by a subject (Husserl 2015 [1913], 175ff.). In this latter case, the relation between the subject and the tree is a phenomenological one in that there is an intentional relation from a subject towards the tree. Is there a difference between the tree in-itself and the one perceived by the intentional subject? No. This means that the world is not ontologically divided between real trees and perceived trees nor between intentional subject and a non-intentional subject. The difference is a linguistic one, not an ontological one. If I add the word ‘perceived’ to the sentence “there is a tree in the garden” making it “there is a perceived tree in the garden” this sentence does not magically grant the tree some new ontological status because it is merely a description which demonstrates the relation of the tree with a perceiving subject (Descombes 2014, 56). Ultimately, the intentional object (perceived tree) and the natural/material object (tree) are one and the same. So intentionality is not some sort of magical capacity, but a way to describe the relation of a subject that acts towards an object. Agency, on the other hand, has never been associated to a mode of description – it is employed under all modes of description. In a way, this might seem more practical, but given that, unlike intentionality, agency is not an “action under an intentional description”, there really is no understanding of what agency actually is from an ontological perspective. Thus, while intentionality remains ontologically neutral, agency remains ontologically dubious. As Latour points out, “agencies are part of an account; they are given a figure of some sort; they are opposed to other competing agencies; and, finally, they are accompanied by some explicit theory of action” (2005a, 52). This is to a large extent what has happened with agency in the last decades, with agency being seen as a property (Malafouris 2013) or even something within the agent (Gell 1998). This last case is particularly problematic and as we shall see, clearly untenable.

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3.4 the agency within Alfred Gell’s conception of agency sees humans and/or objects as acting of their own volition. Gell defines agency in the following way: “Agency is attributable to those persons (and things, see below) who/which are seen as initiating causal sequences of a particular type, that is, events caused by acts of mind or will or intention, rather than the mere concatenation of physical events. An agent is one who 'causes events to happen’ in their vicinity. As a result of this exercise of agency, certain events transpire (not necessarily the specific events which were 'intended' by the agent). Whereas chains of physical/material cause-and-effect consist of 'happenings' which can be explained by physical laws which ultimately govern the universe as a whole, agents initiate 'actions' which are 'caused' by themselves, by their intentions, not by the physical laws of the cosmos. An agent is the source, the origin, of causal events, independently of the state of the physical universe.” (Gell 1998, 16). So for Gell, a physical law produces “happenings” while prior agentive intentions produces “actions”. The attribution of prior intentions implies the attribution of a mind to an agent, something that can be done to both humans as to non-humans. Once an object has become enmeshed in social relationships, objects themselves can initiate sequences of actions (Gell 1998, 17). Of central concern here, is the idea of a causal sequence because this is the link that can be established between Gell’s notion of agency and the philosophical notion of agency as it is traditionally conceived. Roderick Chisholm, following Thomas Reid, argues that agency is the capacity to cause an event, and to this Chisholm adds that such a capacity can only be conceived as agency if there is the possibility to also not cause it (1976, 53), also known as “freedom to choose otherwise” (Pleasants 1997). According to Gell, a social agent has the capacity to cause an event through will, mind, or intention. Furthermore, Gell also states that the exercise of agency produces events that not always results in what was originally intended

(Gell 1998, 16). If this is true, the intention itself might never materialize, in the same way that some people will promise to work harder the night before only to procrastinate the following day. Therefore, there really is no connection between the intention and the action. So let us imagine two agents, one, a politician that holds considerable influence and the other, a person that suffers of locked-in syndrome, i.e. someone that is conscious and aware but cannot voluntarily move any muscle in the body. If the politician has the intention to enact a series of laws, given his influence, he might see the establishment of those laws come to fruition. The person suffering from locked-in syndrome might have the exact same intentions as the politician but given his predicament, those intentions will never see the light of day. People with locked-in syndrome can usually communicate by flicking the eyelids but let us assume that the person in question cannot: he is for all intents and purposes, a passive object that cannot project its will or intention. How can we then possibly know that both the politician and the person with locked-in syndrome have the same intentions? With the politician it is easy: the fact that he put effort into enacting a certain number of laws shows that he had the intention to do it, and the fact that he could have chosen not to, i.e. has freedom to choose otherwise, shows that he was not compelled by external pressure. The case of the person with locked-in syndrome is more problematic because without the capacity to move or to communicate, there is no possible way to know whether he has or not the intention to enact laws. Therefore, the only way to actually know if someone had or has a certain intention is by either communicating it or by acting upon it. Naturally, when I look at people I have never met, I automatically assume that they have intentions. Why is that? There are several reasons: since I have an internal monologue that constantly remonstrates my lack of action and pressures me to act, I assume that the same must be happening to others; I can also recognize that other people have intentions simply because they are where they are today, something that could not have happened accidentally; and finally, because in conversation I listen to plans and the ambitions of other


people which shows that they have intentions. In all three cases, I am projecting intentionality onto everyone based on my analysis of a sample of the population. The case would be very different if we were to analyse the action itself. From the point of view of the correspondence theory of truth, it can be said that a politician enacted a law if he actually enacted a law (Tarski 1944). This makes the statement empirically verifiable because all one has to do is confirm whether or not the law came into effect. With regards to the intention, one can also say that the politician had the intention to enact a law if he actually had the intention to enact the law, but in this case, there is no possibility for empirical verification. What does this mean? According to those who subscribe to Gell’s notion of agency, it means that the intention to act can exist without a single action occurring. This is rather problematic because if we follow Gell’s idea of what a social agent is, a brain in a vat (Putnam 1981) can be a social agent just like any other person in the real world. Furthermore, the similarity of Gell’s notion of action and Hempel and Oppenheim’s (1948) is uncanny in that there is not only a simple cause-effect sequence going from a to b, but something that makes the a to b possible, in Hempel and Oppenheim’s case it is a law and in Gell’s case it is a prior intention. Furthermore, both prior intentions and laws of nature do not need the actual cause and effect in order to exist: intentions and laws can both be existent without any action ever occurring. Gell’s view of intention reminds me of the movie Minority Report which is based on a short story by Phillip K Dick. In a nutshell, the movie tells the tale of a police force called PreCrime that can predict murders ahead of time and conduct an arrest before the murder occurs. This process is so successful that for years no murders actually occur. There is, however, an ethical issue PreCrime is dismissive of: people are arrested even though no crime has been committed, only the intention to commit the crime. The time that elapses between having the intention to kill someone and the actual murder is the window of opportunity in which the agents of PreCrime capture the would-be murderers. Premeditated and carefully planned murders provide a larger time

frame for capture because there tends to be a certain amount of time between planning to kill someone and actually going through with it. Unpremeditated murders provide a smaller time frame because these murders are usually in the spur of the moment. Outside of science fiction, it is impossible to predict the future, therefore, arresting people before a crime is committed is generally not viewed positively by our society. Similarly, I find it uncomfortable to assign intention merely because of intention itself. If someone who has never murdered cannot be called a murderer, it is wrong to assume someone or something has intention when that intention has never manifested physically. Moreover, this same logic has to be applied to social agents: one cannot attribute social agency prior to the actual acts that demonstrate agency (Gell 1998, 20). Agency cannot be an a priori capacity just as “murdering” is not an a priori capacity. Early in this chapter I argued that even if a certain capacity or property is found in humans, it does not derive that such a capacity is owned by humans. With regards to agency, this would translate into the idea that the capacity to initiate an action does not entail owning something called ‘agency’. If agency is ‘owned’ by humans, then a brain in a vat is as much an agent as anyone else. It can be argued that all one needs to confirm agency is witness a conscious action by an agent, for instance, seeing a man pay for a gift at a store. While this seems reasonable, this leads us down a road in which anything and everything can be an agent. For instance, Wittgenstein asks the following question “[w]hy can’t my right hand give my left hand money? – My right hand can put it into my left hand. My right hand can write a deed of gift, and my left hand a receipt” (2009 [1953], 101). Thinking of agency in Gell’s terms, why can we not assign agency to my left hand and my right hand and define them as social agents? As Wittgenstein points out, my right hand can grab money and put it in the left hand so would that not mean that my right hand is an agent? Detractors might argue that the action starts not with the hand, that the hand does not initiate an action per se, it is the mind/brain that starts the action. If this last statement is true, we have returned to the

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problem in which agency can be ascribed to brains in vats. Let us look at this topic from a different angle: there is a history book that narrates in vivid detail the life of a miller known as Menocchio in sixteenth century Italy and his trials with the Inquisition (Ginzburg 2013 [1980]) where everything that you expect an agent to be capable of doing is done by the miller in question. Now, is it necessary that this man have agency in order to act, speak, love, hate, etc.? Or can he still act, love, hate, and speak without agency at all? The question is not metaphysical in that it does not matter whether he has agency or not, the question is whether we can describe a man acting, loving, hating, without the concept of agency and the answer to this question is yes. One can construct the entire history of a person without having once refer to the fact that he has the ability to act, love, hate, speak, etc. Let us look at a teleological explanation provided by Ginzburg, in reference to Menocchio: “However, at the beginning of the trial Menocchio denied ever having said anything of the kind. He was trying, without much success, to be cautious and follow the advice of his old friend, the vicar of Polcenigo. And to the question "What is your belief concerning the souls of faithful Christians?" he had answered: "I said that our souls return to the majesty of God who deals with them as he pleases, depending on how they have acted, assigning paradise to the good and hell to the bad and purgatory to some:' He thought he had found cover in the orthodox doctrine of the Church (a doctrine that he didn't share in the least). Actually, he had plunged himself into a terrible labyrinth.” (Ginzburg 2013 [1980], 66). The narrative, which aims at explaining the trials of Menocchio and the Church, must rely from time to time on providing some explanations as to why Menocchio acted the way he did, otherwise, the narrative would have to rely solely on standard description. Thus, when faced with a question during one of his trials, Menocchio tries to be cautious by following an advice to his friend. This attempt is to lessen the problems he faces: he

acts intentionally in a way that, to his perception, might be beneficial to him. Any attempt to subsume Menocchio’s history to a general cause or to metaphysical agency would imply sacrificing the narrative mode of description in favour of a causal one: it strips Menocchio’s story of its narrative intelligibility and the intentionality behind his actions. Furthermore, Menocchio’s intentions are in response to something external to him, they are, in virtue of them being teleological, for the “sake of the state of affairs” which are supposed to follow (Taylor 1964, 5). While agency does have some potential when applied narrowly and concretely (Barrett 2000; Johnson 2000; 2006, 122; Wobst 2000), the truth is that it has, in recent years, become more of an “ambiguous platitude meaning everything and nothing” (Dobres/ Robb 2000, 3), something that is so slippery to define and “see” (Dobres/Robb 2005, 159). This is further evidenced in Gell’s work where agency is seen as some sort of global characteristic of the world of people and things in which we live (1998, 20). The amount of definitions that agency has gone through and will continue to go through is a symptom of trying to figure out what a metaphor is from an objective perspective. In the volume about agency in archaeology edited by Robb and Dobres (2000), the most insightful comment on agency comes from Henrietta Moore when she claims that “[t]he social engagement archaeologists have with the people they study is through the ethical spaces created by the pre-theoretical assumptions and values that make the discipline and its practice possible” (Moore 2000, 260). Agency, alongside self, personhood, individual, and other cognates are not essences in themselves but pre-theoretical assumptions, or as Moore calls them “concept-metaphors” (1997, 2000, 2004). The usefulness of these categories comes not from their specificity but their constant ambiguity and vagueness. Any and every society can be discussed under the banner of “agency” if one can keep the concept vague enough. The moment we attempt to narrow it down, it loses its value and popularity. An archaeology of agency has become what Dobres and Robb have mockingly predicted an “archaeology of breathing” (2005, 160). A good mental exercise


to understand this problem would be to open any archaeological journal or book and see if the case-studies can or cannot be addressed through agency. If we are indeed to think of agency as a “global characteristic” (Gell 1998, 20) than yes, anything and everything can be addressed through agency. By thinking of agency as this global characteristic, we have also left the human and social sciences because there is nothing human or social about it. In this sense, agency shares more similarities with Henri Bergson’s Elan Vital (Bergson 1907), Hans Driesch’s Entelechy (Sander 1993), Iain Hamilton Grant’s naturphilosophie (Grant 2006), Jane Bennet’s Vitalism (Bennett 2010), and Benedict Spinoza’s Pantheism (Israel 2001). It is therefore unsurprising that the popularity of agency has been accompanied by a similar rise in popularity of these forms of materialism. These materialisms however, come off more as spiritualist and panpsychic theses than they do as actual materialist ontological schemes, but instead of having God manifest in everything like in Spinoza’s pantheism, agency is manifest in everything (Bryant 2011; 40, Žižek 2013, 640): agency theory has become panagenceism. Ultimately, agency cannot tell us, for instance, why a hunter-gatherer from Tanzania can or cannot get a hamburger at a fast-food restaurant. It is simply impossible to explain whether this situation is possible by resorting to agency alone while completely ignoring the history of the hunter-gatherer in question, of his tribe, of Africa, of fast-food franchises, etc., whereas through history it is not only possible but essential. Why is that? Besides the historical and social context, the “capacity” to choose something at a fast-food restaurant is not something that exists independently of the actual empirical and social act of ‘ordering’. There simply is no “capacity” stricto sensu. If we think of agency as “capacity” then we must concede that anyone from a person that lived during the Bronze Age and a hunter-gatherer in Africa have the “capacity” to choose something from a fast-food menu. Let us imagine that the hunter-gatherer in Africa decides to leave the tribe and migrate to a big city, there he learns the norms and rules generally associated to

metropolitan life, and eventually he one day enters a fast-food restaurant and orders something from the menu. In this perspective, the hunter-gatherer shows the exact same capacity as a person living in the western world who enjoys eating fast-food, but for the hunter-gatherer to finally be able to order from a menu, we must tell the story of how he came to be in that specific situation because otherwise it would make no sense. What this means is that without a history, no matter how much agency or freedom one can have, there is no way of understanding why a hunter-gatherer from Africa made a conscious choice of what he wanted to eat in a fast-food restaurant. Naturally, it also cannot be the intention to migrate to a city either that led the hunter-gatherer to the fast-food restaurant: he could have decided to avoid eating fast-food, as many people in the western world commonly do. This, in a way, explains why agency is so general and vague: agency has to be vague in order to include actions as disparate as making a choice in a fast-food restaurant or a politician opting to enact a certain number of laws. So when we describe something in a historical fashion are we not already taking about agency? As Gell puts it, “we recognize agency ex-post facto, in the anomalous configuration of the causal milieu – but we cannot detect it in advance, that is, we cannot tell that someone is an agent before they act as an agent” (1998, 20). If this is true, then agency is unnecessary because the actions of the agent already imply agency and there is no need to refer to the action and agency since they both refer to one and the same thing. In caricature, that would be like saying that someone loves another person not only because he loves another person but because he has “loveness” within him that allows him to love. Obviously, this is untenable because then we would have to create a whole new set of words to define the capacity to hate (“hateness”), to want (“wantness”), or we could be more specific, the capacity to drink wine (“winedrinkency”) or the capacity to make wine (“winemakency”). Basically, what I am asking is why must there be something, that we cannot see and we simply do not fully understand, to make human action possible? As Schlick argues:

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“[l]f the "phenomena" are appearances of something else, then the mere fact that this "something else" is that particular reality of which that particular phenomenon is the appearance - this fact enables us to describe reality just as completely as the appearance of it. The description of the appearance is, at the same time, a description of that which appears. The phenomenon can be called an appearance of some reality only in so far as there is some correspondence between them, they must have the same multiplicity; to every diversity in the phenomenon there must be a corresponding diversity in the appearing things, otherwise the particular diversity would not form part of the phenomenon qua phenomenon, nothing would "appear" in it. But if this is so, it means that the "appearance" and the "appearing reality" have identically the same structure. The two could be different only in content, and as content cannot possibly occur in any description, we conclude that everything which can be asserted of the one, must be true for the other also. The distinction between appearance and reality collapses, there is no sense in it” (Schlick 1979, 359). Moritz Schlick’s comment is quite complex but what is important is the idea that there is no world of appearances and an underlying ‘real’ reality. This parsimonious way of looking at reality would mean, at least in a social context, that there is no difference between the action and the agency that allows that action to happen. Schlick’s comment can also be applied to intentionality but Descombes has already taken Schlick’s concern in consideration: “In reality, practical intentionality is not an activity at all; in order to have a goal, one need not have given oneself over to some sort of separate mental activity of "intending" or "aiming at" something. To have an intention in doing something is rather to do what one does and to do it with an aim such that there is an intentional relation between one's present activity and the anticipated result.” (Descombes 2014, 13). The idea that there must be a cause for why people act is a symptom of a philosophy that is

outdated. It is what Meillassoux has termed correlationist philosophy, a philosophy inherited from Kant, which sees reality articulated exclusively through a human perspective (2008). Agency, which justifies why people and/or objects can act, is more a projection of life into every aspect of reality. Like Driesch’s Entelechy (Sander 1993) or Bennett’s neo-vitalism (2010), agency is a push towards the idea that there must be a permanent locomotive running behind the scenes – movement can only exist in virtue of something else. This leads to a permanent regress, if agency is what provides the capacity for action, then what has given agency that capacity? God maybe? Removing agency from the equation is admitting to the fact that maybe there is nothing behind the scenes. Maybe reality is simply just us ordering burgers at a fast-food joint and nothing more. In archaeology, any real world phenomenon that can be explained by appealing to agency can also be explained by not relying on it. While the situation of a Tanzanian hunter-gatherer who finds himself ordering a burger at fast-food joint can be explained without once referring to agency, the same cannot be said about history. If we were to enter our closest fast-food joint and we were to see a man with face paintings, a loincloth, and a bow and arrow, while ordering a burger, one would need to know the story behind this situation in order to understand it. In narrative composition, every comprehensible moment depends on a series of chains of events in the direction of the past and the future (Descombes 2001, 182). Similarly, a hunter-gatherer in a fast-food joint has a comprehensible past that made this scenario possible and the explanation of this process lies in understanding how it developed through time. Similar objections can be raised concerning intentionality – that like agency it fails to have an explanatory capacity that is of benefit to archaeology – which is true. However, I do not advocate an ‘archaeology of intentionality’ given that such an archaeology would be completely useless. What intentionality provides us is an understanding of why archaeology requires a historical viewpoint. If everything that has been stated above concerning intentionality is acceptable, then it would derive that all social action is directed towards the objects of their


time, objects which can be real or imagined. Even an inventor, who thinks about something that has yet to be invented, is thinking within a historical context in which ‘invention’ and ‘future’ have a specific meaning. Unlike agency which has been addressed under an essentialist and inherent viewpoint, intentionality is an expression, and not an effect, of what it makes manifest (Descombes 2001, 19). This means that getting a burger at a fast-food joint, for instance, is a direct expression of human thought and not a consequence of it. What does this entail to the archaeologist who enquires about past societies? Describing the choices of social members in the past is the description of their actions in their mental aspect – or in other words, in their distinct teleology (Descombes 2001, 20), a teleology which makes sense within a context where institutions of meaning exist.

In conclusion, the key-idea we must retain before proceeding to the next chapter is that social action is irreducible to cause-effect sequences because all social action requires a historical context in which the action makes sense. Logically, this would mean that all theories that provide a general or universal cause as an explanation for social action is automatically precluding historical forms of explanation. Does this mean that archaeology must avoid generalization at all costs? No. In fact, generalization is an essential part of archaeological inference and without it archaeological practice would not be possible. In order for this issue to become clear, we need to understand the different ways in which we can generalize, pluralize, and theorize in archaeology which is what I present in the following chapter.

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4 archaeo logy a n d i t s o bj e ct s o f s t u dy

4.1 problematizing enquiry and archaeo logical theory The content of the previous chapters have generated more questions than they have answered, especially with regards to how archaeologists provide explanations about past societies. In fact, the previous chapters seem to indicate that an archaeology focused on historical understanding is one that precludes generalization and theorization. The intention of the current chapter is to explain how and in what circumstances it makes sense to generalize and theorize and what these practices actually entail. Archaeology, like most scientific disciplines, rely on causal, teleological, and narrative modes of description. A discipline like physics might rely less on the narrative mode than the discipline of history, for instance, nevertheless, physics does, when necessary, provide explanations in narrative format. Concurrently, history also relies on the causal mode of description when it is necessary. What determines what mode is being used are the questions that require answering. Even in cases where no research question is put forward, it is assumed that a scientific explanation is answering one. With regards to the topic of the current thesis – the historical understanding is the necessary component to answering why-questions concerning the actions of humans within societies, e.g. “why did Greek citizens practice magical rituals?”, “why did Bronze Age societies shift to single burials?”, “why did the Dustbowl farmers migrate to California?”, and so on. Accordingly, there are several answers that cannot be gleaned through a historical understanding, which is why it is necessary for

archaeology to also rely on the causal mode of description. One advantageous aspects of the causal mode of description is its inherent flexibility since the causal mode allows a focus on varying ranges of empirical generality. What do I mean by this? The causal mode can focus on something very specific like why certain species of spiders prefer specific geological contexts, but it can also be very general in that it can answer why all birds have beaks. In archaeology, the connection between levels of generality according to the causal mode is done via middle-range theorizing (Bettinger 1987; Binford 1977; Forslund 2004; Raab/Goodyear 1984; Shott 1998; Smith 2011; Trigger 1995) in which a theory of the general sort ‘connects’ or ‘interdigitates’ with the archaeological data via an intermediary theory – that of the middle-range. Middle-range theory has been employed in different ways by archaeologists, but in a gist, there are two main ways it can be applied. According to Lewis Binford’s conception of middle-range theory, a body of theory is necessary to reduce the distance between the static archaeological record and the dynamic cultures one is trying to understand (1977). A static archaeological record is a set of contemporary facts from which a further set of formation processes of the archaeological record can be inferred. These inferences are essential to archaeology as they bridge the general process of how change and diversity occurs in cultural systems with the contemporary facts that are witnessed in the archaeological record (Binford 1977, 7). Middle-range theory applied in this manner is exclusive to archaeology given that archaeology is the only discipline that makes inferences from the archaeological record.

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This conception of middle-range theory however, is very different from that conceived by the original source of the concept: Robert Merton (1968). As Michael Shott argues (1998), Binfordian middle-range theory is more akin to what Michael Schiffer has termed the study of formation processes (1987) or formation theory. The Mertonian alternative to Binfordian middle-range theory was adapted to archaeology by Mark Raab and Albert Goodyear (Goodyear/Raab/Klinger 1978; Raab/Goodyear 1984), and described in Merton’s own words, middle-range theory is: “(…) principally used in sociology to guide empirical inquiry. It is intermediate to general theories of social systems which are too remote from particular classes of social behavior, organization and change to account for what is observed and to those detailed orderly descriptions of particulars that are not generalized at all. Middle-range theory involves abstractions, of course, but they are close enough to observed data to be incorporated in propositions that permit empirical testing.” (1968, 39). Middle-range theory, despite its varying instantiations, has proven itself fruitful in archaeology as it diminishes the distance between general theories and the observation of particular real-world instances (Smith 2011, 168ff.). While Mertonian middle-range theory is the conception that holds more favour today, there are some problems associated to it. These problems lie not in any inherent aspect of middle-range theory itself but in the general qua high-range theories that are associated to it. If we accept that “[m]iddle-range theory serves general theory by testing the latter against the empirical record” (Shott 1998, 303) then general theories have to be empirically substantial. In this perspective, the ranges or levels considered by middle-range theory must vary in empirical content. Thus, a high-range theory is one that contains very general facts about reality, e.g. “demographic pressure forces societies to create centralized governmental institutions” whereas a low-range theory is one that focuses on facts that are less general and cannot be extended to other societies, e.g. “pot sherds found in region y and produced during

period x were made with locally-sourced clay”. The difference between high and low-range theories concerns the empirical extent or range of what is being stated, so a high-range theory is of use in different parts of the world and different periods of history whereas the low-range theory has a much more restricted incidence. Logically, middle-range theory can be adequately applied in this manner in archaeology but Merton did not conceive middle-range theory in this way given that he sees theory as something that is substantially different from empirical statements, in fact, Merton sees high-range theories as something not directly testable (Raab/Goodyear 1984, 256). Like Merton, Michael Smith claims that “middle-range theories are intermediate between descriptions of the real world and high-range theory; empirical generalizations are something else entirely” (2011, footnote 4) which means that high-range theories are distinct from empirical generalizations. This distinction is rather problematic because if highrange theories are structurally different from those deemed low-range, then there cannot be a middle-range that mediates the two. This is particularly problematic for archaeology which is one of the few disciplines that consistently relies on high-range theories and ‘uses’ or ‘connects’ these theories by means of middle-range theorizing. Moreover, another problem in archaeology lies in the lack of consistency when it comes to defining theory (Johnson 2006, 117). It seems that any activity that involves abstract thinking in archaeology can and will be qualified as theory. For instance, archaeological theory has been defined as: “the conceptual basis of studying the past using material data” (Dark 1995, 1); “(…) by definition, theory describes abstractions and generalities which go beyond the specific instances with which it may be concerned” (Hodder 1992, 4); or even “theory (…) enables us to take the insights of one discipline and translate them into another. It enables us to show (...) how we might translate or modify them to reflect our own concerns” (Johnson 2004, 106). These three comments are sufficient to show the lack of consistency between what archaeologists believe archaeological theory is. If we add to this the argument that archaeological theory does not actually exist (Flannery/Marcus

4 Archaeology and its objects of study

2011, 24), the role philosophy of science should play in archaeology (Kelley/Hanen 1988; Krieger 2006; Schiffer 1981), and Kuhnian paradigms (Binford/Sabloff 1982; Clark 1993; Clarke 1972; Leone 1972; Martin 1971; Meltzer 1979; Sterud 1973), we are left even more confused as to what truly constitutes archaeological theory. Nonetheless, Michael Schiffer has presented one of the most comprehensive yet objective descriptions of archaeological theory (1988). For Schiffer, archaeology theory can refer to several things: “"Theory" is used in several different senses in archaeology, and so must be carefully defined. In its least precise usage, theory is applied to a specific explanation of a particular past phenomenon. Although such explanations employ general principles, being tied to a given time and place they are not themselves nomothetic statements. Theories in this sense should be regarded as explanations, explanatory sketches, models, or hypotheses - not theories at all. Theory also sometimes denotes an investigator's fundamental assumptions about the nature of human societies and culture. (…) I now turn to a final definition of theory, which is adopted here. Theory, according to many philosophers of science (…), consists of a series of basic premises, postulates, or assumptions that specify certain fundamental entities, processes, or mechanisms, often implicating phenomena that themselves are unobservable (at the time of theory formulation). For example, "atoms" and "molecules," key entities in several theories, were postulated long before they could be observed. Many processes invoked by archaeologists such as agricultural intensification and political centralization also are unobservable, not simply because they must be inferred for past societies but because they often occur over a span of time so long or on a spatial scale so great that direct human monitoring is precluded. Even in the present, one can observe only aspects of these processes or some of their effects. Theories do not invariably invoke the unobservable, but this is a common pat-

tern. The main function of theories is to explain less comprehensive theories and laws.” (Schiffer 1988, 461–462). In very general terms, Schiffer synthesizes the essence of what archaeological theory is but his differentiation between the ranges of theory seems to be predicated primarily on proof. Nevertheless, what Schiffer is trying to convey is the fact that the more empirically adequate archaeology is, the less abstract it is. The first definition of theory, which Schiffer does not consider as theory at all, is a specific explanation of a particular past phenomenon. It is assumed that these types of explanation require no proof because they are constructed directly from observation. His second definition of theory reports to the fundamental assumptions which he denotes as ‘paradigms’, ‘frameworks’, and the term Schiffer prefers, ‘conceptual schemes’ (1988, 462). Unlike theories, conceptual schemes (Aune 1987; Davidson 1973; Putnam 2012, 56ff.) provide no explanatory capacity as these schemes concern how humans organize experience. Lastly, theory concerns assumptions about certain processes or mechanisms about how the world operates. Of the three definitions, the second and third one are quite problematic. It is important to recognize that Schiffer’s definitions of theory originate from philosophy of science and to understand them a bit better we must look towards the work of Ernest Nagel on which Schiffer posits his ideas. Nagel differentiates theories from experimental laws since theories are not generalizations based off of the repeatability of specific phenomena (1961, 85). This begs the question concerning what theories are and to this Nagel states that some scientists claim that theories are “free creations of the mind” but nevertheless theories can be suggested by observational materials but do not require observational evidence for their existence (1961, 86). According to Nagel, theories explain a certain law however, the law is not dependent on the theory and can survive the potential demise of the theory to which it is subsumed (1961, 86–87). So in a way, theories are nothing more than assumptions. There is nothing wrong in having assumptions but if, as Nagel states, these assumptions

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are nothing more than “free creations of the mind”, then they do not have any empirical anchor that links them to reality. An example of one of these types of theories is Marvin Harris’ cultural materialism (1979) which was accused of being dogmatic precisely because it failed to have a direct link to empirical data (Anderson 1973). Harris however, rejects this accusation and states that “(…) the credibility of the entire strategy [of cultural materialism] rests upon the empirical status of the interpenetrating theories5 (…) (1979, 75). Bruce Trigger repeats this same idea claiming that the credibility of a high-range theory, cultural materialism for instance, depends on the repeated success or failure of associated middle-range theories (2006, 34). I find that this way of thinking about middle-range theory is incorrect. As Anthony Boudon has shown, the problem of middle-range lies not in the range of the theories, but in the logical structure of the theories involved (1972, 410). While different empirical generalizations share the same logical structure but vary in range, assumptions generally have a different structure from generalizations, a structure that precludes them from being empirically verifiable. So Mertonian middle-range theory has been applied through two distinct processes, the first processes connects empirical generalizations with particular empirical instances whereas the second process connects these particular instances with assumptions. I recently implemented middle-range theory with some colleagues by following the first process. In our study, we assume that a given set of human essentials qua capabilities are required for humans to live prosperously. When these capabilities are taken away from the general populace, there is a large probability that people will revolt, and this is what we believe might have happened at the site of Okolište, in Bosnia, during the late Neolithic (Arponen et al. 2015). The way we applied the principles of middle-range theory was by combining an empirical theory called the capabil-

5 ‘Interpenetrating

ity approach which claims that when an oppressing regime takes away the most basic capabilities from people, e.g. the capacity to obtain shelter, food, clothes, these people have a higher chance of revolting – and we have empirical suggestions that this is what might have happened in Okolište. In our case, the difference in range is one of empirical generality, based on the probability of what happens when capabilities are taken away. From a causal perspective, there is a putative Humean causal connection between the act of sequestering capabilities (the cause) and the revolt against this act (the effect). Whether this case should have been studied under the aegis of the historical and narrative mode of description I commend in this thesis is open to debate, but what matters now to my argument is that the rules of the causal mode of description were followed when it was applied to the capability approach. In set-theoretical terms, our study broke down individual capabilities into their unique items (food, clothing, and shelter), meaning that the capability approach, as a theoretical formulation, can be reduced to determinate objects and thus be studied under the causal mode of description. The issue with Mertonian middle-range theory is that the structure of certain highrange theories might not be receptive to reduction. Some conceptions of agency theory for instance cannot be reduced to determinate elements such as objects, events, or actions. Thus, when Harris and Trigger argue that the credibility of an irreducible high-range theory depends on success of failure of associated middle-range theories, the question we must ask ourselves is how are high-range and middle-range associated in the first place? It seems that the association is one predicated primarily on discourse, which means that low and middle-range theories can only be associated to high-range theories by embedding sentences that address all three ranges. If this is true, then there is no empirical link between irreducible high-range theory and low and middle-range theory, and any and

theory’ is synonymous to ‘middle-range theory’.


every high-range theory can be considered viable as long as someone knows how to produce a coherent discourse that includes all three ranges of theory. James Anderson (1973) was correct in that these theories are indeed dogmatic, and consequently, fideistic: they rely more on belief than they do on fact which means they should be considered as dogmas and not as general explanatory theories. Dogmas should be avoided for obvious reasons, and I believe that John Bintliff expressed quite clearly the consequences of maintaining theoretical dogmas in archaeology: “We have found an increasing trend in classes, for students to repeat pages of leading theory texts as factual accounts of the world, making them less and less able to find their own critical voices. If one challenges students or young researchers to justify why a particular concept or approach has been taken, it is generally the case that the answer is merely that ‘a leading authority wrote this’. Citation of sacred texts becomes more and more the only authority needed to prove a case-study, rather than the matching of several alternative models to the data. Published papers increasingly begin with pages of scholastic citation to works of theory, followed by applications to archaeological data which rely more on repeated reference to the favoured approach than providing convincing matching of concepts to recovered material evidence.” (Bintliff 2011, 8–9). If certain theories cannot be proven false through middle-range theory nor by any other methods, it is clear why we should be wary of them. Naturally, theories play a crucial role in archaeology but many have been applied in an uncritical manner. Michael Smith relays a case (2011) in which a volume dedicated to the study of ancient cities (Marcus/Sabloff 2008) was criticized for not having enough theory in the form of Latour’s Actor-Network-Theory or Bourdieu’s notion of habitus and doxa (Yoffee 2009, 281). This attitude is unwarranted because if we believe that archaeology should be an eclectic enterprise (Binliff/Pearce 2011), then archaeology should be open to a much

wider range and types of theories and also to the possibility of not having high-range theory at all. Furthermore, by consistently resorting to high-range theories, we are ultimately failing in asking whether they are adequate in archaeology in the first place. This adequacy, of course, oftentimes cannot be tested against archaeological data precisely because they fail to produce any empirically adequate statements. Several archaeologists have fallen into the trap of thinking that theory refers to a type of object that can easily be shoved onto anything archaeological, be it a Palaeolithic campsite or a Mesoamerican ancient city, but the truth is, theory does not refer to a single definable object (Abend 2008). Archaeological theory is particularly prevalent in the USA, UK, and Scandinavian countries so when someone criticizes archaeology that is published in these regions as being under-theorized, they are also indirectly criticizing all archaeological research done outside the USA, UK, and Scandinavia. If we think in terms of research paradigms (Kuhn 2012 [1962]), it is important to realize that not applying theories might be a paradigm in and of itself and that there is no pre-theoretical period of archaeology as suggested by some authors (Clarke 1972; Sterud 1973, 4). The significance of theory changes from country to country, sometimes from university to university, since people follow historical traditions that they believe work best for them and their context (Abend 2006, Wallerstein 2003), and the paradigm tradition that is followed by American, British, and Scandinavian archaeologists concerns not a specific theory – it concerns the fact that archaeology has to rely on theories. The particularity of traditions in research translates into distinctive concepts that help guide the research thus creating a conceptual scheme that is adequate to analysis. A conceptual scheme is often interpreted as theory (Abend 2008, 179–180), which is not entirely accurate. Conceptual discussion is different from what Roy Ellen designates as grand or framework theory as all-encompassing explanations of human behaviour (2010, 394). These grand theories differ from the above mentioned high-range theories as they are actual theories in that they posit an ultimate

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cause that is universal, e.g. Marxist theory. In these cases, middle-range theory is possible because there is a link between the widespread range of a cause with local empirical data. As Mary Fulbrook describes: “[t]he wider metaphysical and essentialist framing [of Marxist theory] can be stripped away, revealing an infrastructure of far more specific, and historically limited or contextualised, economic, social, political and philosophical theories. Each element of these, in turn, can be examined ‘in the light of the evidence’, debated, rejected, developed or reinterpreted in a variety of directions” (2002, 61). In the case of Marxist theory, the notion of an ultimate cause for how societies develop is what allows is to be an explanatory theory. It combines the two elements that are warranted in traditional scientific theorizing which is the capacity to explain (Homans 1964, 812 cited in Abend 2008, 185) and its independence from specific local contexts (Turner 1979, 451 cited in Abend 2008, 186). Abend disagrees that these two factors should account for what theories should consist in given that he, like myself, views the atomistic way of doing science insufficient for the study of societies (Abend 2008, 186–187). However, middle-range theory cannot work unless it includes the determinacy, and consequently, the atomism of scientific variables. As shown with the case of Okolište (Arponen et al. 2015), it must be possible for theories to be broken down to observable variables otherwise, it is impossible to connect a theory to empirical data.

4.2 abstractions and generalizations are not the same thing This means that there is a difference between an irreducible high-range theory and a grand theory (sensu Ellen 2010) in that the highrange theories are abstract. In Schiffer’s description of theory above, he refers to “an investigator's fundamental assumptions about the nature of human societies and culture. Assumptions at this level, which are very abstract, deeply held, and stubbornly incapable

of empirical disproof ” (Schiffer 1988, 462). Can these assumptions be nothing more than conceptual discussion? Many assumptions that can be seen in archaeology come off more as conceptual than explanatory. For instance, when it is claimed that culture is the extra somatic means of human adaptation (Binford 1965, 205; 1968, 218; 1972, 22; White 1959, 8), what Binford and White are providing is not in and of itself a proposition stricto sensu, they are clarifying what culture means. Thus, a claim of this sort cannot be falsified. As Abend states, theory can denote the conceptual apparatus that is applied to the social world (2008, 179, emphasis mine), so in a way, these theories do not require an empirical claim. It is easy to confuse a conceptual discussion with a generalization, for instance Hodder states: “While less emphasis is placed on universals in postprocessual archaeology it is undeniable that prescriptive statements are routinely made, as in 'material culture is meaningfully constituted', 'the archaeological record is (or is not) a text', 'structure is the medium and outcome of action’. While postprocessual (and neo-Darwinian) archaeologists attempt to re-embrace history, contingency and indeterminacy, they nevertheless base their arguments for diversity and difference on general claims. All archaeologies, from whatever tradition, are then evaluated in terms of these generalizing claims.” (Hodder 1999, 205). Prescriptive statements like “material culture is meaningfully constituted” and “the archaeological record is (or is not) a text” are not generalizing statements, they are what Hume addresses as relations of ideas (1975 [1748], 25) and Kant as analytic statements (2003 [1781], 130) and the difference between these statements and empirical generalizations is crucial. For example, what is the difference between the statement “a large part of the significations of a society – those that are, or can be made, explicit – are also instituted, directly or indirectly, through its language” (Castoriadis 1987, 238) and those presented by Hodder as generalizations? At face value, there is no formal difference between this latter statement and those employed by Hodder except that at no


point does Castoriadis believe that he is making a general statement. For Castoriadis, a prescriptive statement is general in that it evokes something that we, as scholars, see as common but not necessarily something that they, the societies under analysis, had in common. What does this mean? Well, when we say that something is a society, the term ‘society’ might not refer to an underlying assumption of how societies are formed, it might simply refer to groups of people that have instituted common significations (Castoriadis 1987). Therefore, when Castoriadis is commenting on societies, he is not universalizing and generalizing at all, much on the contrary, he is clarifying and narrowing the concept of ‘society’. Statements of this sort fail to be empirical generalizations as they contain no empirical truth-value – and thus, are inadequate in middle-range theorizing – they are, for all intents and purposes, attempts at clarifying the meaning of things. In positivist philosophy Kant’s analytic statements were the basis for some of Frege’s key-ideas in mathematical logic, namely the idea that ‘is’ sometimes has the function of the mathematical ‘=’ sign (Frege 1951 [1892], 169). So for example, when Hodder states that “material culture is meaningfully constituted” he is basically saying that material culture = a thing that is meaningfully constituted. As Willard van Orman Quine brilliantly noted, analytic statements focus on how we define concepts (1951). For instance, when we say that “no bachelor is married”, at no point are we making an empirical comment on the world, all we are doing is recognizing the synonymity of ‘bachelor’ and ‘unmarried’. Unlike definitional statements, propositions like “snow is white” do not clarify what snow means or should mean. Furthermore, these propositions can either be true or false. So for example, the statement "snow is white" is true if, and only if, snow is actually white (Tarski 1944, 343). Statements that comment upon definition do not hold truth-value, so, for instance, stating that agency is a property of material engagement (Malafouris 2013; 51, 119) does not reflect any actual empirical aspect of the world of state of affairs therefore, it is not falsifiable. It can be argued that agency, for instance, is a real ontological entity (Malafouris 2013, 148) which is perhaps true, the

problem with this argument is that for agency to be perceptible and included in cause-effect sequences, agency itself needs to be reduced to determinate objects, actions, and events. It is this disconnect between abstract statements and the empirical record that has led some archaeologists to doubt the advantages of archaeological theories (e.g. Bintliff/Pearce 2011; Johnson 2006). To a large extent, the line that separates an abstract conceptual discussion from a propositional empirical claim is impossible to delineate. One can, in one sentence clarify a concept and in the next sentence make an empirical claim. This gives the impression that somehow theory is part of a spectrum that is abstract on one end and empirical on the other, and that middle-range theory is what allows archaeologists to be both simultaneously. This attitude however, is a middle-ground fallacy. Why is that? Let us define ‘abstract’ as those statements that are not propositional, i.e. that make no empirical claim on the state of affairs of the world and ‘empirical’ as propositional claims about the world of state of affairs. If these definitions are agreeable, then ‘abstract’ and ‘empirical’ are not opposites but different things altogether. There is nothing that is more or less empirical nor more or less abstract because there is no range in which statements can be more or less empirical. As an example, the claim that members of modern societies indulge in stimulant consumption because they face a lot of peer-pressure in the modern competitive market is as empirical as stating that some people drink two coffees in the morning because they feel pressured by the strict deadlines of their PhD programme. The difference between these statements is not one founded on empirical adequacy, but on how many cases are considered: in the first statement, we can imagine that 600 million people in the world took some stimulant to help them get through the day – but in the second statement we can imagine that only 0.002 % (12000) of those take coffee twice in the morning while in a PhD programme. Ultimately, the problem of archaeological theory is a logical one. Empirical enquiry can be performed with varying ranges but these ranges do not necessarily make statements more or less empirical. Additionally, there are

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certain theories which are irreducible and which resemble more what Bintliff calls ideological conformity (2011, 8). These can also be conceived as theoretical assumptions. Many would argue that the sciences (and archaeology in particular) cannot be performed without assumptions (Longino 1990) and I would agree. The question we must ask ourselves is: what type of assumptions do we need and do these assumptions have to be related to how humans behaved socially in the past? Or can the assumptions focus not on past human behaviour but on how we, as archaeologists, construct these past behaviours?

4.3 the objectification of archaeology Anthropology has undergone many changes in the past years (Comaroff 2010). One of these changes concerns the high level of abstraction in which it has become steeped in (Ellen 2010, 389; Moore 2004; Schiffer 2000, vii–viii), an issue that can also be witnessed on a lesser scale in archaeology. In a way, everything is theoretical in certain terms. Ian Hodder, for instance, has criticized the idea inherent in middle-range theory that the lowest level of “theory” can be elided with “empirical data” (Hodder 1982a, 5–6; 1999, 60). For Hodder, everything is theory-laden (Wylie 1989a) in that there is no strict separation between data and theory. I find this ontological flattening of all levels of theory a bit disingenuous since Hodder is very capable of actually identifying real differences between these levels of theory in his own research (Kosso 1991; Tshauner 1996). The claim that “everything is theory” confuses two different things: for instance, when I say that one book is a sci-fi novel and that another book is a biography I am obviously not altering their ontological status – they are still books – however, the sci-fi novel and the biography contain text that is different and fall under different categories. Sci-fi novels generally refer to futuristic content, space or time travel, the supernatural, extra-terrestrial life, etc. while the biography generally provides detailed descriptions of the

life of a person. In general, this is how we differentiate these two genres of literature. Now, the difference between theory and data in archaeology can be differentiated based on what is being expressed when referring to data and when referring to theory, not on their actual physical form. Following this line of reasoning, we have to think in two different levels: on a meta-level everything is in fact theory-laden whereas on a scientific level, archaeologists do separate theories from the data. However, in light of what was said in the previous sub-chapter, it is clear that the separation of theory and data is insufficient: we must think beyond what is abstract (theory) and what is data (empirical). This habit of thinking in terms of being empirical or theoretical can lead to unwarranted attitudes in archaeology. Those who defend the constant use of theory cultivate an attitude that promotes speculation and conjecture about human behaviour whereas those who defend the more empirical approaches to archaeology are stuck in some sort of old-school machismo under the claim that ‘real’ archaeologists are constantly in the field. One side prides itself by reading as many obscurantist philosophers as possible and the other side prides itself by digging as many sites as possible. Anthropologists have been facing this same problem. In fact, the problem is much more rooted in anthropology because of differences separating anthropology and ethnography (Ingold 2008; Moore 2004). Anthropologists have, nevertheless, come up with some interesting ideas. In anthropology, the problem lies in the automatic assumption that anything more empirical is more certain. As Henrietta Moore has pointed out, anthropologists feel comfortable and assured that the ‘local’ aspect of their profession is concrete while the ‘global’ and whole is somewhat insecure and vague. The truth of the matter is ‘local’ and ‘global’ are both abstractions of reality (Moore 2004, 75). There is also the issue of assuming that the global is an abstraction of local facts. For example, Eric Wolf asserts “that the world of humankind constitutes a manifold, a totality of interconnected processes, and inquiries that disassemble this totality into bits and then fail to reassemble it falsify reality” (2014 [1982],


293) and “endowing nations, societies, or cultures with the qualities of internally homogenous and externally distinctive and bounded objects, we create a model of the world as a global pool hall in which the entities spin off each other like so many hard and round billiard balls” (2014 [1982], 295). There is much to be gleaned from Wolf ’s comments namely the problem of reifying mere words into actual entities. Naturally, Wolf does not suggest we dismiss terms such as ‘culture’ or ‘society’ as mere reifications, only that they should not carry evaluative prejudgements about their nature (2014 [1982], 303). Moore, on the other hand, propounds a different view: “Concept-metaphors like global, gender, the self and the body are a kind of conceptual shorthand, both for anthropologists and for others. They are domain terms that orient us towards areas of shared exchange, which is sometimes academically based. Concept-metaphors are examples of catachresis, i.e. they are metaphors that have no adequate referent. Their exact meanings can never be specified in advance – although they can be defined in practice and in context – and there is a part of them that remains outside or exceeds representation. Concept-metaphors are, of course, as important to science as they are to social science: think, for example, of the notion of the mind. One of their very important roles is to act as a stimulus for thought – precisely because they do exceed representation – and to act as domains within which apparently new facts, connections or relationships can be imagined. At such a stage, their existence is posited and not proven. The problem with concept-metaphors – or at least some of them – is that by their nature they continue to have a shifting and unspecified tie to physical objects or relationships in the world.” (Moore 2004, 73). In the previous chapter it was argued that ‘agency’ lacks a coherent definition, and through Moore’s notion concept-metaphor, we can understand why. As Moore states, it is assumed that people in the past were organized socially and were capable of social relations (2000, 260) and that is why we automatically

assume that the capacity to act socially presupposed in agency theory is extendable to past societies. However, as argued in the previous chapter, our capacity for social action is not action at all since social action depends on the existence of external factors to the human. Like Longino, Moore argues that it is imperative to support some assumptions (2000, 260) in order that archaeology as a discipline and its practice is possible. Archaeology and anthropology often rely on assumptions that pertain primarily to human behaviour but history, for instance, does not. Unlike archaeologists and anthropologists, most historians do not necessarily posit their claims on pre-established ideas about agency, power, culture, energy, etc. With this in mind, let us imagine an archaeology that holds no assumptions about how humans and societies interact, instead let us ask how the human past can be known and here, we return to how the sciences can be divided. In chapter 2, I suggested that the sciences can be divided into three main models and modes of description: the empirical, the social, and the historical, and I believe that all three models are adequate for archaeology. I also state in chapter 2 that these models and modes of description find their adequacy depending on what type of questions are being asked. Through this process of enquiry, archaeologists create their objects of analysis. Of these there are a total of four main types of objects that archaeologists can engage with: the individual object, the plural object, the social object, and the abstract object. The most basic object to apprehend is the ‘individual object’. In this category we put the human individual, the ceramic sherd, the hut, the grave, etc. These are the determinate objects that Castoriadis refers to (1984, 209) and the central pillar of the causal mode of description. They are, from the perspective of the laws of thought, the ones that are easy to identify, and consequently, easy to quantify. This naturally leads to the second category which is ‘plural objects’. These objects are nothing more than mathematical sets that contain objects that share a certain number of qualities. A plural object cannot be a set that contains random items, e.g. [Margaret Thatcher, cat, cup, elephant], it must contain items that have

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common qualities. It can be argued that a random set like [Margaret Thatcher, cat, cup, elephant] contains items common in that they are all determinate objects but in this sense, the set would be represented in the following way [x: x is a determinate object]. It is also important to recognize that even the qualities shared by the individual elements of a plural object need not be determinate themselves, meaning that these categories can either be monothetic or polythetic (see Clarke 1978, 35–37; Sneath/Sokal 1973, 20–22; Taylor 2010, 159ff.; 2012, 75ff.). So for instance, a monothetic category like ‘diamonds’ requires that diamonds present a particular arrangement of carbon atoms to be qualified as diamonds (Taylor 2012, 75) but a polythetic category like chairs (Taylor 2010, 159–160) contains objects that do not share qualities that are determinate. Polythetic categories are more akin to objects that share what Wittgenstein calls “family resemblances” (2009 [1953], 35–40). Some might ask: “how is it that plural objects which contain individual objects which share family resemblances are not a social object?” It is very simple: plural objects are conceived intentionally as collectives in that what matters is that what can be said of an individual object can also be said of another object of the same set. For example, in chapter 2, I argued that even though recessions, as a plural object, is clearly a polythetic category, we must assume that they are determinate objects in order that causal claims can be made about them, e.g. recessions cause suicide. Thus, it matters not whether these plural objects are monothetic or polythetic categories, what matters is that the individual objects contained within plural objects are pluralizable. Furthermore, plural objects are the most important objects when it comes to archaeology as pluralization is what allows us to generalize particular characteristics in order to achieve classifications. So for instance, it is through generalization that archaeologists are able to classify pottery which present the same shape or pattern of decoration. As shown above, the causal mode of description is possible because of individual objects and plural objects – and middle-range theory relies on the premise that what can be ,

said of one case, can be said of another case. In set-theoretical terms, stating that the archaeological sites of region y entered a period of collapse at the end of the Chalcolithic requires the set [x: x is sites of region y]. In fact, this can even be narrowed down further by adding more variables (Raab/Goodyear 1984), for instance, we can state that sites of region y, which are fortified, entered a period of collapse at the end of the Chalcolithic, forming the set [x: x is sites of region y which are fortified]. Ideally, middle-range theory should work primarily through the interplay of individual and plural objects. A social object is the consequence of institutions of meaning, which means that social objects cannot be reduced to individual objects, plural objects, or abstract objects. Unlike individual objects, social objects are not determinate but they are not reifications either (sensu Wolf 2014 [1982]). For instance, when we say that a team has won a football match, what are we actually saying? That the individual football players won the match? What about the players that belong to the team but did not play in this match? What about the coach? These questions, while seemingly trivial, demonstrate that a football team must have an existence that extends beyond that of individual objects yet, at the same time, is not abstract nor a reification. Unlike a plural object which can be seen as a collective of individual objects of the same set, a social object is one that comes out of an agreement. Football teams, armies, religions, are paradigmatic examples of social objects but they are not collectives of people, in that an army is not a mathematical set that contains soldiers, guns, and uniforms. It can be objected that the concept of ‘army’, which cannot be reduced to individual objects, has to be abstract since it cannot be empirically understood. This is, in fact, what Karl Popper argues in The Poverty of Historicism (1960, 135). For Popper, objects like armies are abstract: “[w]hat is concrete is the many who are killed; or the men and women in uniform, etc.” (1960, 135). From an empirical point of view, Karl Popper might have a point because he is looking at social objects from the perspective of the qualities that are shared among members of the same set. Thus, Popper assumes


Fig. 1 Abraham Bosse’s Leviathan.

that an army is the same thing as saying ‘the Germans’. When we say the Germans, i.e. we are indeed talking about a mathematical set, in that the Germans refers to the set [x:x is everyone who is German]. An army however, is not obviously composed of soldiers alone, given that armies also employ medics, translators, engineers, etc. that do not see active battle. Unlike the Germans who have something common to all, the members of an army do not actually share any quality among themselves (Descombes 2014, 139). Ultimately, an army, a religion, a team, and a society cannot be seen from an empirical perspective. On the original frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan we see Abraham Bosse’s representation of the Leviathan as a giant crowned figure. A closer look reveals that this crowned figure is actually composed of individual men and women (fig.1). What the image aims at representing is a whole that is irreducible to the parts, however, the whole acquires a new status that extends beyond that of the individual. So this means that social institutions are more than the people who compose it, in the same

way that a library is more than the books it contains (Descombes 2014, 147). As Hodder points out in Entangled, there is a process of objectification of things, of codifying reality through discourse (2012, 7–8), and in a way, that is what happens when we say that a country has entered a recession period or an army has invaded a country. However, while Hodder’s entanglement theory focuses more on how things are objectified, witnessing an army invading a country is not a matter of objectification but rather of predication, i.e. assigning an action to a subject. Here, we return to the issue broached in the previous chapter – that of understanding reality through an intentional action. If we see a group of people, wearing the same uniforms, carrying similar weapons, engaging in military actions, we assume that they are soldiers that belong to an army. Once again, what matters here are not the individual objects per se because those objects exist only in virtue of the historical context in which it makes sense to be part of an army. In archaeology, the adjective ‘social’ has lost its usefulness since everything can be con-

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ceived as being social in one way or another (Webmoor/Witmore 2008). On a meta-level everything is indeed social in the same way that everything is composed of sub-atomic particles. This meaning of ‘social’, however, is of little benefit to archaeological practice. The ‘social’ we are interested in and is central to the meaning of social objects concerns the institutions that are created by a society. A cell phone, for instance, is created by members of a society but in and of itself, the cell phone is not social – what is social are the institutions that have allowed us to create cell phones, e.g. industrial manufacture, engineering school, market economy, etc. In short, the defining feature of a society is the ‘capacity’ to institutionalize how things are done, i.e. in being able to follow rules. Cornelius Castoriadis has described this process and he states that there are two essential institutions to every society, the legein and the teukhein: “It is self-evident that the very existence of society, as anonymous and collective doing/ representing, is impossible (or, at any rate, inconceivable for us) without the institution of the legein (of the ability to distinguish-choose-posit-assemble-count-speak) and the application of the identitary-ensemblist logic incorporated in the latter. Social doing/representing always presupposes and refers to distinct and definite objects that can be collected together to form wholes, which can be composed and decomposed, and which are definable in terms of determined properties, serving in turn as the basis for the definition of these properties.” (Castoriadis 1987, 227). The concreteness of individual and plural objects is linked to the legein, to wit, the legein entails an identitary-ensemblist logic. Can it be said that all societies have legein? Yes because legein is the capacity for a society to make itself. Without legein, all we would have are mere agglomerates of people. Let us not go down the dangerous road of assuming that a characteristic is a cause: legein does not cause human groups to coalesce into societies, rather legein is what we understand as socialization. But in Castoriadis’ scheme legein is only half of what makes a society. The other half is the

teukhein: the process of assembling-adjusting-fabricating-constructing (Castoriadis 1987, 260). While the legein is the capacity for social representation, the teukhein is the capacity for social doing, and in both we witness the capacity for societies to become themselves. Naturally, societies do not undergo processes of institutionalization that follow a chronological order – for instance, a group of people does not come together and agree on the legein and then two months later agree on the teukhein and five months later agree on forming a market economy and so on. The reason I usually bring up economic institutions (banks for instance) is to highlight how far back one can drag the history of things like money, banks, and debt (e.g. Graeber 2011) and how it is only by talking about economic institutions at this scale that one can have a full overview of what the history of money involves. If we were to address money as the pieces of paper I have in my wallet and someone asked me why I call it ‘money’ I could answer that it is because most people believe it is money. It is assumed that for money to work as medium of exchange within economic systems there must be the common belief that money has an exchangeable value. If only one person believes that the current bank note in their wallet is money it would be impossible for it to be used as a form of currency. This type of reasoning distinguishes itself from the reasoning applied in the causal mode of description and transcends that of individual and plural objects given that these object are predicated on what people believe they are. The pieces of paper in my wallet can still be studied empirically, but this type of study does not give us any indication of the belief that it is money. John Searle has noticed that social facts like believing that the pieces of paper in my wallet is money leads to self-referentiality: “If the content of the belief that something is money contains in part the belief that it is money, then the belief that something is money is in part the belief that it is believed to be money; and here is, in turn, no way to explain the content of that belief without repeating the same feature over and over again” (Searle 1995, 33). Searle’s way out of this problem is to argue that social facts are dependent on “brute


facts”, i.e. facts about determinate objects (1995, 35). According to Searle, the belief in money requires that money have a physical form and in way, I believe Searle is correct but I do not believe that just because social facts require physical manifestation, that the physical manifestation must logically precede the social fact. To clarify, money requires a physical format but that does not mean that money has two existences: one as pieces of paper and one as a currency. Money is pieces of paper and currency at the same time. If we believe that money is two different things, then we are indulging in a form of dualism that does not make much sense. In the previous chapter, I argued, through the phenomenological notion of intentionality, that there is no difference between what is perceived, what is interpreted, and what is physical. A bank note is simultaneously something physical and money - at the same time. The difference lies in how one addresses money. This means that there is not a world of social facts as studied by the social sciences and a world of brute facts as studied by the empirical sciences – there is only one world that can be described in different ways.

4.4 not the assumptions we want , but the assumptions we need Returning to theory, we can recognize that many of the abstract assumptions in archaeology are nothing more than Moore’s concept-metaphors, or as I call them here, abstract objects. These are the fourth type of objects employed by archaeologists and they serve as umbrella-terms, thus allowing archaeology to be discussed, like in anthropology, on a global level. These objects have a very limited connection not only to individual and plural objects but also social objects. This is, perhaps, where some confusions might exist. For instance, a social object like an army or a religion is not abstract yet at the same time they are not like cups or red cells. Abstract objects on the other hand, have no referent per se. So in a gist, we can say that:

∙ Individual and plural objects – empirically

observable and explainable through causal processes. ∙ Social objects – empirically observable but not explainable through causal processes. ∙ Abstract objects – not empirically observable and not explainable through causal processes. Of course, the objects of most interest to us now are social objects. As we saw in the previous chapter, a phenomenon like wanting to go to attend the World Cup is not reducible to a cause-effect sequence and thus requires an understanding of the historical context in which wanting to attend the World Cup makes sense. Naturally, a phenomenon a like wanting to attend the World Cup is empirically observable in that propositional statements about the intention of going to World Cup can be made and consequently falsified. Also in the previous chapter, it was claimed that what determines the intention to go to the World Cup is the World Cup itself which means that such an intention is specific, i.e. not generalizable. That is one of the aspects that makes the explanation of social phenomena such as these not subsumable to theory that generalizes the causes of behaviour as we shall see in chapter 6. If we now rethink the argument by Moore that we must have pre-theoretical assumptions about how humans behave (2000, 260), we can argue that those assumptions need not be about behaviour at all. In fact, it can be stated that we have no idea how humans behaved in the past before we identify the institutions of meaning associated to their behaviour. One cannot say that a given society practices sharing nor can we say that sharing is a universal characteristic of human behaviour because not all humans are familiar with the juridical notion of property. The assumptions then concern not past societies themselves but how we, as archaeologists, produce explanations of the past and how reality is objectified to make such explanations intelligible. It can be remarked that on some level, all discourse about members of past societies must require some commonsensical assumptions about what they did and how they behaved and this is true, but this is due more to affectations of modern language

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than due to presuppositions of behaviour. For instance, saying that a prehistoric pit contains trash is a rather innocent statement many of us make to indicate our exasperation in finding yet another backfilled pit. It does not mean however that the prehistoric people in question have a notion of ‘trash’ that is equivalent to ours. Trash is just part of a mental map: it is the word we use until we find something more appropriate or until we discover that whatever is in the pit is, in fact, trash. All our words come with certain meanings attached to them so when we apply them to foreign societies, we are, in a way, presupposing they behaved like us. This leads to another issue that has yet to be treated: interpretation. In recent years, the act of interpreting has received a rather rough treatment in archaeology (Alberti/Jones/ Pollard 2013; Olsen 2012) based on the false belief that there is a marked difference be-

tween hermeneutic and phenomenological approaches. In recent years, archaeological interpretation has been elided with Ian Hodder’s hermeneutic approach in specific – and with any form of symbolic understanding in general (e.g. Olsen 2012, 22). This elision has forcefully pushed interpretation into a corner, with archaeologists now believing that archaeology can be performed without resorting to interpretation. By following a materialist agenda and rejecting interpretation of meanings, the ‘new materialists’ (Witmore 2014) are actually perpetuating the stance they often decry: that of being Cartesian dualists. As we shall see in the following chapter, the separation of the world into a realm of the material and a realm of the symbolic is actually untenable and a true non-dualist vision of the world is one that recognizes meanings as fundamentally historical.

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5 archaeology a n d t h e m e a n in g o f o bj e ct s

5.1 archaeology ’ s meta physical quarrel and the locus of meanings In the previous chapter I introduced a fourfold scheme of archaeological objects of analysis but these objects are only a mere subset of a wider-ranging set of objectives, methods, and discourses that encompasses archaeology (Hodder 1999, 17–18). Nevertheless, I believe that looking at the objects of archaeology first provides some insights that are occluded if we look from top-down perspectives, the top referring to theoretical frameworks, because, ultimately, archaeologists work with a series of necessary objects and only then do they construct explanations which involve these objects. Given that some of these objects are more constrained in their definition, little is said about them, while abstract objects seem to attract more attention. For instance, archaeologists feel comfortable in sharing basic concepts like ‘stone’ or ‘pot’ rather than abstract concepts like ‘materiality’ or ‘agency’. While this latter type of concepts have generated countless publications, the former rarely draws discussion: archaeologists simply agree on what ‘stone’ and ‘pot’ refer to. Christopher Tilley states that these types of agreement do not count as interpretation (Tilley 1993, 2). The reason why Tilley believes this is because there is a non-critical acceptance that a stone is a stone, whereas interpretation requires subjective choices (1993, 3). Tilley, in his distinction of what is accepted and what is interpreted, has pointed out one of the major flaws in the reasoning that permeates archaeology to this day – that the acceptance that a stone is a stone is somehow more objective, or even worse, that a stone

being a stone is an ‘ontological’ certainty, while interpretations of the stone are not. This metaphysical divide between a realm of ontological certainties and a world of symbolic meanings is untenable and we shall see why further below. If I could describe the current theoretical panorama in archaeology in one word that word would be ‘contrast’. This contrast refers to the differences between the ‘interpretational’ version of archaeology, associated to postprocessual archaeology, and the archaeology of more recent years which is based on ontological presuppositions and materialism. Although I have referred to this latter trend in previous chapters, it is when addressing meanings that the ‘new materialisms’ encounter several obstacles. In postprocessual archaeology, the human is seen as a subject, dominated and dominating a web of textual significations he or she has created, whereas according to the new materialisms, a human is merely an object among objects within a field of relational interactions (Fowles 2010; Jones/Alberti/ Fowler/Lucas 2013, 19–20). The issue, of course, lies not in recognizing which of these ontological presuppositions is ‘correct’ – because ontology, which concerns metaphysics, is automatically speculative. In archaeology, the textualist reading of the past was central to postprocessual archaeology and was championed by Ian Hodder and it is, to a large extent, against him that the materialist critique is directed (see Olsen 2012). In short, Hodder’s work focused on the irreducibility of the social which he correctly claimed could not be subsumed under scientific approaches (Hodder 1982a). This did not mean a tout-court rejection of science (see Vanpool/ Vanpool 1999) but Hodder was indeed correct in assuming that the causal mode of de-

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scription implied in the sciences was inadequate for understanding social meanings. This was the underlying premise of Hodder’s hermeneutic approach to archaeology. This approach, which was considered hegemonic during the 1990’s (Olsen 2003, 2012), has dwindled considerably (Shennan 2007), especially in light of new ideas. It is impossible to pinpoint how or why Hodder’s hermeneutic approach has lost so much influence in recent years, but to a certain degree, the rise of materialist approaches within and without archaeology has certainly contributed to its decline (Olsen 2003; Olsen 2010; Olsen et al. 2012). Trends in the sciences, especially in the social sciences, tend to come and go but sometimes, these trends not only wish to present something different, they wish to establish themselves as the new status quo by revolutionizing the discipline (Kuhn 2012 [1962]). In archaeology this manifests in a way in which it is not enough to simply bring something new to the table, everything that came before must be rejected (Ribeiro 2016). Thus, the material turn in archaeology, which has been gaining traction in recent years, has made archaeologists view ‘meanings’ and ‘interpretation’ with suspicion. Although some effort has been made to include meanings and interpretation in the material turn, e.g. Jones/Alberti/Fowler/Lucas 2013; Domanska 2006a, 2006b, in general, the focus of the new materialist archaeology has been the ‘materiality’ of ‘old things’. I find this dismissal of meanings and interpretation detrimental for several reasons: if history repeats itself, it will only be a matter of time before the new materialist archaeologies are deemed stodgy and inadequate to the needs of archaeologists and are consequently replaced by a form of interpretational archaeology hidden behind a new façade; secondly, and most importantly, a cursory reading of the scholars that defended archaeological interpretation some decades ago (Hodder 1991; Shanks/Hodder 1995; Thomas 2000; Tilley 1993) reveals that their ideas were not as radical as they are painted today; thirdly, removing

meanings from archaeological practice is throwing away the baby along with the bathwater” it leaves too large a gap in archaeological practice which is one of the many reasons why there are still a great number of archaeologists reluctant in adopting materialist approaches (Olsen 2013). Overall, this thesis is intended as a contribution to understanding meanings and interpretation, and this chapter, in specific, intends to demystify these notions. In order to do this, there are several things we must be aware of, the most important of which is the fact that meanings and the material are not incompatible. When this conclusion is reached, it becomes clear that there is no archaeology that is exclusively material or exclusively interpretative: archaeology simply becomes archaeology. First of all, the materialists are not critical of meanings and interpretations per se, they are critical of what meanings and interpretations philosophically entail. Hodder’s hermeneutic approach, which had the objective of interpreting meanings of past societies, seemed to entail some form of idealism – that reality only derives meaning from situated subjects. Hodder’s work was, in fact, idealist even though an idealistic archaeology was not his original intention (1992, 96). Moreover, Hodder never lapsed into anti-materialism as he never denied the existence of a physical world on which one could base archaeological inferences. As he states himself: “[w]e can grasp the particularity of the past “because historical meanings, however 'other' and coherent to themselves, are nevertheless real, producing real effects in the material world, and they are coherent, and thereby structurated and systematic”” (Hodder/Hutson 2003, 217). Furthermore, Hodder never argued that the natural sciences are incorrect in their statements, only that their applicability is limited (Vanpool/Vanpool 1999, 34). This is further demonstrated by his reliance on traditional forms of scientific enquiry in archaeology such as formation theory6 (Tshauner 1996). All in all, Ian Hodder’s ideas and his contribution to

6 Tschauner refers to Binfordian middle-range theory which was, as we saw in chapter 4, synonymous with what Michael Schiffer calls formation theory (1987).

5 Archaeology and the meaning of objects

the rise of interpretative archaeology are much more level-headed than the way it is now described. It is, however, true that Hodder’s hermeneutic approach does follow a tradition that is largely textualist (Johnsen and Olsen 1992), i.e. which sees reality as nothing more than a text that can be read (Olsen 2010, 56–58), but this tradition might not have reflected Hodder’s true ontological presuppositions. From a metaphysical point-of-view, Hodder faced some difficulty in trying to conceive a world that was simultaneously material and meaningful. What he ended creating was a dualistic world of matter and meaning. To be fair, it is not easy to conceive an ontology that can be simultaneously material and meaningful, however, it is on this specific issue where most current materialist ontologies also derail. For instance, the materialist ontologies that are predicated on either Latour’s principle of symmetry (see Webmoor 2007; Webmoor/Witmore 2008; Witmore 2007) or that rely on Bennet’s neo-vitalism (see Jones/Alberti/ Fowler/Lucas 2013, 22; Olsen et al. 2012) are actually idealist. A look into the premises of these ‘materialisms’ reveals a reliance on ideas which were considered idealist before the ascension of the poststructuralist and postmodernist forms of idealism. As G. E. Moore describes: “Modern Idealism, if it asserts any general conclusion about the universe at all, asserts that it is spiritual. There are two points about this assertion to which I wish to call attention. These points are that, whatever be its exact meaning, it is certainly meant to assert (1) that the universe is very different indeed from what it seems, and (2) that it has quite a large number of properties which it doesn’t seem to have. Chairs and tables and mountains seem to be very different from us; but, when the whole universe is declared to be spiritual, it is certainly meant to assert that they are far more like us than we think” (Moore 1903, 28). The archaeologists who support either Latour or Bennett are indirectly supporting this spiritual view of the universe. Why is that? For instance, the ontology of David Lewis (1986),

known as Humean supervenience, is based on an irreducible material level, or in other words, a fundamental level on which everything else supervenes whereas the materialist ontologies defended by Latour and Bennett require a fundamental non-material qua spiritual level, much like Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology (Harman 2002, 2010; Wolfendale 2014). As G. E. Moore claims, conceiving things from a spiritual point-ofview is conceiving things as if they were like humans (Lindstrøm 2015). Thus, the material aim of decentring the human (Webmoor 2007; Witmore 2007), also present in posthumanist philosophy (Haraway 2008), should imply rejecting those things that make humans exclusively human and a proper ontology of the material has to be one that cannot rely on any property understood as human (Meillassoux 2008). In other words, the current materialist ontologies should be focusing on what makes the material world inert (non-human) and not what makes them alive (human), but this is not what they are doing. As Žižek states: “(…) New Materialism relies on the implicit equation: matter = life = stream of agential self-awareness – no wonder New Materialism is often characterized as "weak panpsychism" or "terrestrial animism”. When New Materialists oppose the reduction of matter to a passive mixture of mechanical parts, they are, of course, asserting not an old-fashioned teleology but an aleatory dynamic immanent to matter: "emerging properties" arise out of unpredictable encounters between multiple kinds of actants (to use Bruno Latour's term), and the agency for any particular act is distributed across a variety of kinds of bodies. Agency thereby becomes a social phenomenon, where the limits of sociality are expanded to include all material bodies participating in the relevant assemblage. For example, an ecological public is a group of bodies, some human, most not, that are subjected to harm, defined as a diminished capacity for action. The ethical implication of such a stance is that we should recognize our entanglement within larger assemblages: we should become

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more sensitive to the demands of these publics and the reformulated sense of self-interest that calls upon us to respond to their plight” (Žižek 2014, 8). What Žižek has captured in this quote is the continued dependence of thinking in human terms that the new materialisms require. The current materialist ontologies claim to decentre the human subject, a subject which is viewed as being privileged and reified but what they have actually done is not ‘materialize’ or ‘ontologize’ the relation of humans and the world, they have merely expanded the human subject to the realm of the inert material. Therefore, the idea of a centred subject that interprets a world of meaningful symbols, an idea decried by the current materialist ontologies, is still fully present in these same ontologies. The difference however, is that the subject is not the individual human anymore, the subject is some sort of abstract panhumanist or panagential assemblage. Bjørnar Olsen, whose materialist approach relies less on non-material elements like ‘agency’ and ‘vibrancy’, has also had a hard time divesting himself from idealism, partly due to his support of phenomenology (2003, 2010, 2012). Phenomenology, which has had a strong presence in archaeology since the 1990’s (Tilley 1994; Thomas 1996) was adopted as a direct approach that enquires about experience in the past (Johnson 1999, 192). It has received some warranted (Barrett/Ko 2009; Fleming 2005, 2006) and unwarranted criticism (sensu Hamilton et al. 2006, 31–32) but as an approach, it does provide some very interesting insights. In recent years, Olsen has turned to phenomenology given that it is, prima facie, congenial with his materialist aims (Olsen 2003, 2007, 2012). While in the work of Tilley (1994, 2004), Hamilton and Whitehouse (2006), and Bender (Bender/Hamilton/Tilley 2007) phenomenology has been used as an interpretative tool (Olsen 2012, 23; Thomas 2012, 86), Olsen sees phenomenology primarily as active experience instead of as interpretation. As he puts it himself, “[p]henomenology, after all was launched as a way of ‘relearning to look at the world’ (Merleau-Ponty), a return to ‘the things themselves’ (Husserl), that is, to a practical, lived experience,

un-obscured by abstract philosophical concepts and theories” (2003, 96). However, I believe that the interpretational phenomenology of Tilley, Hamilton and Whitehouse, and Bender might actually make more sense than the experiential phenomenology of Olsen. To Olsen’s phenomenological project which involves the return to things, we must ask the questions “which thing?” and “what makes it a thing?” As Descombes argues: “The phenomenologist watchword had been: the return to things themselves. This return was designed to avoid purely speculative constructions. But what are these things themselves that demand description? The prototype of "the thing itself " is the thing in nature, inasmuch as we are aware of its being in front of us. Yet phenomenology did not see that this was the prototype of the thing itself; it thought it, by means of an unconscious speculative operation, prior to any description. This ignorance of the speculative moment was possible only because phenomenology had overlooked the question of language. Hermeneutics shows how it is the language we use that for us has constituted the thing perceived as the prototype of the thing itself. The thing itself was not always the thing perceived, however, precisely because this language has a history. To every epoch in language there is a corresponding epoch of the thing itself.” (Descombes 1986, 70–71). Being a language philosopher, it was obvious to Descombes that there is a strict relationship between phenomenological description and language. It could be argued that the correct phenomenology has nothing to do with language, but with sensorial input, or that phenomenology is about pure unadulterated experience. To this I ask: experience of what and how does one recognize these experiences? Olsen is correct in stating that phenomenology did pose a challenge to Kantian idealism, namely to the idea that the relationship to reality is mediated by structures of experience (Olsen 2007, 583), however, phenomenology did not replace Kantian idealism, it just re-assessed it. Phenomenology did not do away with representations per se, what it did do was


argue that representations did not precede experience, rather, representations are experience. When we think of experience and interpretation there is a cognitive bias that leads us to believe that somehow one must precede the other in a chronological fashion: that one perceives, and then interprets, or that a person has an interpretation before perceiving (e.g. Hanson 1958, chapter 1). Technically, both of these ideas are wrong given that both processes are actually just one process. For example, if someone fears a wolf, there is an intentional relation between the subject of the fear and the object, the wolf – but this process is only possible by identifying the wolf, recognizing it as a wolf and assuming that it is the wolf and the wolf alone that is the source of the fear, or in other words, by submitting oneself to the laws of thought. If we follow Olsen’s version of phenomenology, we are stuck with immediacy and nothing more. It would be impossible to experience things other than what is directly immediate to the senses. Imagine a man that has always wanted to visit Japan and eventually decides to visit it: what is it that gives him the feeling of expectant joy the moment he sets a foot off the plane? Is it the tarmac? Well, most airports have tarmac runways so why does he not feel joy when stepping on the same tarmac in the country where he comes from? How is it possible to feel expectant joy towards such an object as large and complex as Japan? These are questions that could never be answered if we follow Olsen’s version of phenomenology because he has decided that experience and interpretation cannot co-exist. The problem evoked by the new materialists lies not in idealism per se and the solution lies not in materialism either. The problem lies in viewing the world as either material or idealist (Thomas 1996, 12). With this in mind, we must differentiate two very different stances: the ontological stance which puts emphasis on philosophical arguments in favour of materialism, as represented primarily by Timothy Webmoor and Christopher Witmore, and the ideological stance which puts emphasis on the importance of objects, as represented primarily by Bjørnar Olsen. Olsen’s ideological stance is simply that, an ideology, and one that is based primarily on

the tautology that humans are dependent on the physical environment. For example, Hodder states that “[e]ven the earliest cultural acts, such as the making of fire, involved an assemblage of objects – from fire-making tools, to the pit in which the fire was made, to the wood used for fuel, and thus the containers or tools used to cut or collect wood, and so on” (2011, 155–156). It is undeniable that humans are dependent on the environment but this obvious truism does not really answer any scientific question. Moreover, the argument that societies could not function without material things is ultimately a counterfactual one. Counterfactual reasoning is not an explanation stricto sensu nor is it a traditional way of assigning causation (Chisholm 1946; Goodman 1947; Lewis 1973) – all counterfactual reasoning provides is a condition without which an event could have occurred or an object exist in the way it does. In general, counterfactual reasoning is expressed in statements of the sort: “if kangaroos had no tails, they would topple over” (Lewis 1973, 1) and as one immediately recognizes, this type of reasoning does not necessarily provide a cause or a reason as to why kangaroos can stand upright, it only states a condition in which kangaroos can stand upright. Thus, the claim that societies depend on objects does not explain why societies and objects co-exist the way they do. To wit, in order to understand why societies are dependent on objects requires a history which provides the understanding of how these objects entered people’s lives. As we saw in chapter 2, reducing society to the things that compose it fails to capture the element that makes us capable of understanding societies – and that element is meaning. Meaning is what differentiates our understanding of a social object like a football team from the understanding of a plural object like a set of eleven people. Thus, the objective at hand is to understand why some sets of eleven people can be addressed as a football team while other sets cannot – and this requires understanding what meanings actually are.

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5.2 what does ‘ meaning ’ mean anyway ? While there are several scholars in archaeology who have dedicated their time to the study of meanings in archaeology (e.g. Barrett 1988; Shanks/Tilley 1987; Thomas 2000; Tilley 1989a), Ian Hodder is the scholar who has provided the most comprehensive and systematic approach to meanings. Overall, he was correct on many fronts, for instance, he was right in arguing that the key to understanding past societies cannot rely exclusively on the empirical sciences. He was however, incorrect in assuming that understanding past societies required interpreting within the context/hermeneutic of those societies (1992, 10). Understanding other societies through their own context/hermeneutic is posited on the assumption that each of these societies, their individual members, and their institutions, possess a coded system that is only intelligible as a whole. Furthermore, to understand a part of the whole, one must know the contextual whole. The problem of contextual wholes is that it lacks any proper definition – it is abstract and has little to no applicability from an analytical point of view as we shall see further below. Thus, anything and everything can be conceived as a contextual whole. Moreover, a brief look into cases in which people transfer from one culture to another shows that social meaning are not necessarily articulated through wholes. Let us look at a case which exemplifies this issue: an English scientist has recently arrived to Japan and there, she joins a lab where she engages regularly with her colleagues; she then decides to learn about Japanese culture but given the fact that the only people she knows are Japanese scientists, she has to turn to them in order to understand more about Japan. How could she be able to learn anything new about Japanese culture? Would she see things solely from a scientist’s perspective? Let us add another variable: the English scientist eventually learns the Japanese language. Could her conception of Japanese culture change? If it can, in what part of the process of acquiring Japanese proficiency does it happen?

How is it possible for someone who is engaged within a given context/hermeneutic able to understand things through a different context/hermeneutic? Hodder’s hermeneutic approach has two main characteristics: first, it is semantic in that it focuses primarily on the symbolic substrate of reality, and second, it is holistic in that meanings must be understood within a contextual and coherent whole: in short, Hodder’s hermeneutic approach is based on semantic holism. So for instance, in a description of the Haddenham Neolithic causewayed enclosure in Southern Cambridgeshire, Hodder’s hermeneutic approach is one that requires perceiving the interaction of the elements as if they were part of a coherent whole and the understanding of this site is obtained through the constant reworking of this whole (Hodder 1999, figure 3.3.), a process which is known as the hermeneutic circle. The Haddenham causewayed enclosure is an example that Hodder provides a demonstration of how archaeologists reason (1999, 38–39), a reasoning that requires coherence and correspondence (Collingwood 1946 cited in Hodder 1999, 34). Hodder interprets this process as the study of whole-part relationships (1999, 33). If parts form a coherent whole, it would derive that differences in parts would mean differences in wholes, or in other words, there is a systemic whole which will alter if parts are displaced or replaced. A whole is a whole and understood as a whole which would mean that translation from one whole to another whole is precluded. To wit, cultural elements from British society cannot be used as a comparison to elements from Japanese society. In Hodder’s words: “Most, if not all archaeological argument from artefact typology to evolutionary theory, is based on analogy and comparison. In all such cases, information is transferred from context a to b on the basis of similarities and differences. But an underlying problem is that we cannot be sure, in the realm of cultural behaviour, that contexts are sufficiently similar for the transfer of information. We know that the same thing can have different meanings in different contexts. In language, we work out the different meanings for the sound 'saw' from contextual


clues. In bodily signalling, the same gesture (two fingers held up, palm to race) can mean different things in different contexts ('victory' on the European continent, a 'sexual insult' in Britain). The same straw hat means very different things when worn in a butcher's shop, in a punt on a liver, or on the stage with cane and spats. The evaluation or similarities and differences has to be balanced against the interpretation of context.” (Hodder 1999, 47–48). To a large extent, Hodder is absolutely correct in his assessment in that things can have different meanings in different contexts. What is problematic is the notion of ‘context’ itself. In order to understand where Hodder’s notion of context comes from we must see where he found inspiration for his hermeneutic approach. As Johnsen and Olsen have pointed out, Hodder’s hermeneutic approach relies largely on the textualist model of hermeneutics (1992) and by following the textualist model, Hodder has subdivided the world into a material realm and a meaningful realm which represents the text to be decoded. This is patent when he claims that “material culture (…) is organised by concepts and ideas which give it meaning” (Hodder 1992, 11). This subdivision manifests itself in different ways across Hodder’s work as he sometimes describes this division as one between a subjective level, which he links to Gadamer (Hodder 1991, 11), and the level of the holistic context. So when Hodder states that “[t]he same straw hat means very different things when worn in a butcher's shop, in a punt on a liver, or on the stage with cane and spats” (1999, 48) he is basically stating that, depending on the context, a text can be read in multiple ways. How many ways? Are the three contexts that Hodder refers to the only contexts in which a straw hat has a meaning? If they are, the hermeneutic approach could follow an analytical model: the meaning of the straw hat could be reduced to the formula “x is y in context z”, or in more concrete terms, “a straw hat is used as a protection for the butcher’s head from the changing temperatures in the context of a butcher’s shop”. But let us not forget that there is the subject’s interpretation of the straw hat too. As Hodder states: “[e]ach individual grows

and learns by giving meaning to experiences and by interpreting those experiences in terms of his/her own understanding and knowledge. He/she makes sense of the world and copes with it by fitting it around general assumptions. The world is ego-centered according to sets of values that work, for that individual, in the practice of daily life” (1985, 3–4). This adds another element to the analytical formula above: “x is y in context z for subject a”. Thus, according to Hodder, social action is interpreted by the agent and re-enacted in his or her own way. This is a very idealist way of looking at things which Hodder himself agrees to: “[b]y idealist we mean any approach which accepts that there is some component of human action which is not predictable from a material base, but which comes from the human mind or from culture in some sense” (Hodder/Hutson 2003, 20, emphasis mine). These ideas have two distinct influences: first, Hodder was inspired largely by the work of Wilhelm Dilthey and Robin George Collingwood, to whom he owes the idea that the Naturwissenschaften and the Geisteswissenschaften, which provide explanations that are respectively more adequate for the natural world and human societies, and that to understand a human society one must understand it from within that own society (Hodder/Hutson 2003, 38). Second, Hodder has also found inspiration from the second linguistic turn, the one not associated to Wittgenstein or Russell, but the one associated to rise of Saussurean semiotics in continental Europe. Although Hodder does not actually follow the semiotic reasoning implied in the Saussurean distinction (1992, 174ff.) his work is still largely based on the idea that symbols qua meanings are socially structured (1982a) into coherent wholes. Yates describes Hodder’s notion of context in the following way: “Context operates to close these chains of signifiers, allowing us to conceive of a totality – a 'text' – once again, a totality which produces definable, stable relationships between the signifiers of the differential matrix, and allows us to pass down, once more, to the signified. (…) Thus the context of a burial would be the edges of the grave, which determine what is within it and what is to

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be conceived as outside, as part of the exterior. At the borders of context, the shifts and exchanges of difference are no longer possible.” (Yates 2000, 159). This is why it is important to understand a specific society from within the structure of that same society because it is only from within that one can understand the relation between different parts to the whole. In short, these are the assumptions that serve as the basis of Hodder’s hermeneutic approach to archaeology. Although these assumptions can be and have been challenged, one should, of course, not diminish the importance of Hodder’s work in archaeology given the critical impact it had on the positivistic archaeology of his predecessors, an archaeology that lacked any method or approach to meanings (Kohl 1993, 13). However, even though Hodder’s work was to a large extent very sober, the relativity implied in his version of hermeneutics, that everything is open to interpretation, worked against him. The central maxim of hermeneutics, that all understanding is an interpretation (Descombes 1986, 5) did not appeal to many archaeologists (see Yoffee/ Sheratt 1993). What is wrong with Hodder’s reasoning? If semantic meanings are, in fact, located in the mind and simultaneously holistic then understanding is never possible, not just in archaeology but in every discipline that studies foreign societies. In fact, even moving to a foreign country and adopting that country’s customs and practices would be impossible. Returning to the example of the English scientist in Japan: if the scientist wishes to learn the Japanese language, at no point would it be possible for her to understand anything until she attains full proficiency of the Japanese language. Why is that? Now, if a given Japanese sign is dependent on other signs which belong to the whole context, she cannot learn Japanese by knowing 20% of the signs of the Japanese language because those signs would be unintelligible without the remaining 80%. Given the fact that learning a language is a process of gradual acquisition – it would be impossible for the English scientist to become proficient since understanding is precluded until she is proficient.

Let us look at this example with more attention: the English scientist learns enough Japanese to order something at a restaurant. Technically, if language is a codified system of signs as a whole, then she would not be able to understand what she herself is saying in Japanese because she has not yet attained full proficiency of the Japanese language. In fact, even the words ‘yes’ and ‘no’, in Japanese would be meaningless to her since these words refer to other signs she is not yet aware of. So when the scientist says ‘yes’ in Japanese in response to an order in Japan, she is actually saying something that has a completely different meaning from the ‘yes’ of the Japanese servers at the restaurant. This is to large extent the problem of type of semantic holism implied in Hodder’s work (Descombes 2014, 100–101). There is, however, an opposite perspective called semantic atomism in which the word ‘yes’ can, in fact, be reduced to a determinate meaning – one that is strict and does not depend on the rest of the language. In semantic atomist terms, the English scientist would be perfectly capable of learning Japanese and gradually engage in discourse with Japanese people. Unlike the views of the semantic holist, what the scientist is doing is gradually accumulating atomistic pieces of knowledge of the Japanese language and applying them to her social life in Japan. So when she says ‘yes’ in a Japanese restaurant, the ‘yes’ has the same meaning as that of the server’s ‘yes’ because the ‘yes’ in both cases have the same atomistic meaning. The semantic atomist view is attractive because it would mean that understanding foreign societies is actually a rather simple process: all one needs to do is reduce concepts and objects to their shared and strict meaning: the word ‘cat’ in English and ‘Katze’ in German refer both to the quadrupedal feline which has been domesticated. This is also attractive to those who endorse the idea that meanings are located in the mind since it supports the naturalist thesis that cultural objects can be reduced to ‘memes’ for instance and that these are located in the brain (Dawkins 2006 [1976], chapter 11). The capacity to reduce meanings to sentences, objects, etc. is alluring because if we think exclusively in holistic terms, the term ‘meaning’ could never be applied to individual


objects. A pot could never be only a pot since a pot only derives a meaning from an entire web of meanings, in which a single meaning is meaningless. While Jerry Fodor and Ernest Lepore have made a very excellent case for semantic atomism (1992) Vincent Descombes has demonstrated the limitations of this view (2014). However, for Descombes the answer to understanding meanings lies not in the traditional alternative, semantic holism, but rather in anthropological holism. Unlike semantic holism, which sees the meaning of a sign in relation to its position relative to a complete system of signs, anthropological holism sees the meaning of a sign as dependent on the historical and social context in which the sign makes sense. For instance, understanding what being a cat owner is requires more than recognizing the direct relation of the owner to the cat – as implied in semantic atomism but it also does not require conceiving society as a indivisible whole in which the owner and the cat are mere parts. What it does require, is the recognition of the social relation between the cat owner and other people. Descombes explains this idea in the following way: “(…) if I am the owner of a cat, you cannot also be the owner unless we happen to be co- owners of the same cat. In other words, in order for someone to be the owner of a cat, there must be someone else who is not its owner. The juridical concept of property, like every concept of a status or an institution, is thus holistic, not because it requires a plurality of subjects of attribution of a given status (for example, being the owner of this cat), but because its attribution presupposes the prior application of another concept— that of status— and the concept of social status requires not a mere plurality of subjects, but a differentiated plurality of subjects. Far from receiving from the system the same characteristic trait, they will receive different positions.” (Descombes 2014, 117). Let us then apply this idea to the example of the English scientist in Japan: when the scientist is learning Japanese, she is not simply assuming that there are correct sentences

which need to be said in specific contexts (the semantic atomist view) nor does she need to learn the whole language in order to be able to socially engage with other people in Japan (the semantic holist view) – she needs to recognize what rules are in effect in order to know what to say. So when the scientist goes to the restaurant, the intentional act of ordering something at the restaurant presupposes a historical background – a familiarity with how restaurants work. Her use of the little Japanese she knows is only understandable in the context of ‘ordering’ something at a restaurant, something she probably knows from her home country of England. Anthropological holism brings together several notions that have already been addressed throughout this thesis namely the notion of intentionality and the notion of institution of meaning. As evoked in chapter 2, understanding sociality requires understanding the institutions of meaning that underlie actions that we can describe as being social. So when we refer to the English scientist in Japan, there are several levels of analysis – and the one that is of interest is the one that is truly social, or in other words, the ones that involve institutions of meaning. Let us not forget however, one of the central tenets of this thesis – the physical action of actors within a society are not themselves intrinsically social, symbolic, or meaningful. There is no such a thing as a ‘symbolic’ action (sensu Geertz 1973, 10ff.) as opposed to the instrumental, as argued by Talal Asad (1993, 126). The scenario of the English scientist in the Japanese restaurant can be described as empirical or social, or in other words, through a causal mode or through an intentional and narrative mode. What about intentionality? How does intentionality relate to all of this? Going back to our example: if the English scientist is able to order something at a restaurant it is not because the scientist has interpreted, within her mind, what ‘ordering’ is. Ordering something (miso soup for instance) implies an intentional relation towards an intentional object – as argued in chapter 3. This form of conceiving meanings removes meanings from the context of the mind, the individual, and the semantic whole. Moreover, it also removes meaning from its textualist

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context and places it in its real place: the social act. In fact, as argued by Castoriadis, the capacity to produce meanings is what allows us to state that groups of people are, in fact, actual societies (1987). If we see meanings through the fourfold categorization of objects introduced in chapter 4, people (plural objects) becomes a society (social object) once they have a shared agreement among them.

5.3 I nterpreting institutions of meaning These ideas would entail several consequences for the archaeological interpreter, the most important of which is the fact that understanding past societies is not a process of ‘translating’ one culture to another. Unless the objective is, in fact, to convert lexicographical meanings of one culture to another, something generally associated to ethnographers and what they call the ‘emic’ perspective, i.e. viewing a society from the point of view of their own concepts, the use of the term ‘translation’ can be very misleading. Let us imagine that the English scientist returns home to England and talks about Japan to her friends and family. On one hand, she could describe the complexity of the Japanese language and give some examples of how some words translate from English to Japanese and vice-versa. In this case she is, in fact, engaging in the act of translation as we commonly understand it. On the other hand, she could describe the food she ate at several restaurants while in Japan but in this case it cannot be said that she is actually translating anything. Let us imagine that the English scientist had gone not to Japan at all but rather to another city in England, just 100 km away from where she is originally from. If this were the case, she would describe the food she ate in this new city in the same way as if she had gone to Japan. This seemingly trivial example shows us some of our errors when it comes to archaeological interpretation: we have created an invisible barrier that separates us from the archaeological cultures that we are investigating and assuming that they require translating.

In chapter 3 I describe the situation of a Tanzanian hunter-gatherer at a fast-food restaurant and in this chapter I describe the situation of the English scientist in Japan. The relevance of these two examples is, of course, how jarring and contrasting cultures seem to be when they clash. While the description of a situation in which an English person orders at a fast-food restaurant or moves to Liverpool can be of great interest – given how mundane these examples are, we automatically deem them inadequate as analogies for understanding social meanings. I do not wish to imply that the more distant something is located, temporally and/or spatially, the more interesting it becomes. I am however arguing that just because social members are distant from us, it does not derive that they deserve an exclusive method of interpretation. What do I mean by this? If we can legitimately say that the English scientist is interpreting Japanese culture by going to a Japanese restaurant, could it not also be argued that she is also interpreting if she simply goes to a restaurant down the street from where she lives in England? Some might argue that the familiarity to how restaurants operate in England would relieve her from the act of interpretation but let us imagine the following scenario: the English scientist regularly attends restaurants in which a person tips around 10 % to 20 % if the service is good. One day she attends a restaurant that includes a service tax in the bill. At first, she does not really understand what the ‘service tax’ means on her bill but she eventually figures out that in this restaurant, a service tip is something that is fixed and mandatory. If the scientist describes this situation to her friends, can it be said that she is translating from one culture to another? Ultimately, when we start thinking about situations such as these we must question whether it makes sense to think of interpretation as an act of translation. To illustrate this I would like to present a new example: I am watching a football match with a friend who has never watched or experienced football before. During the match, a player commits a foul and the referee shows him the yellow card. In this instance, my friend, who is unfamiliar with the rules of football, asks me what the


yellow card means. First of all, I must assume that what he is asking concerns not what a yellow card means to me, it concerns what the yellow card means to the player who is engaging in the game. Second, I must assume that my friend is not asking what ‘yellow’ or ‘card’ represents in general. The meaning he is enquiring about concerns not the property of the card itself: it being yellow. Furthermore, I must assume that the player that got the yellow card is not interpreting ‘yellow’ in his mind and having recollections of what yellow means to his life. What is being asked by my friend is what the yellow card means in the context of the football match. So what I tell him is that the yellow card means that the player in question committed an unsportsmanlike tackle against another player and if he continues such behaviour he will receive another yellow card and be promptly kicked out of the match. Let us take this analogy a bit further: my friend states that there is a similar practice in the society he comes from and that in his language such a game is called ‘relgo’ and that it is something that people do for fun. When asked if there are more activities that are similar, my friend states that yes, there are several activities which people do for fun where there is some non-violent competition and this group of activities is called ‘yullops’. Common-sense would dictate that ‘relgo’ can be translated as ‘football’ and ‘yullops’ can be translated as ‘games’ and this translation, in large measure, is correct. Here is where problems arise: we have conflated the two types of meaning. If we reduce football, its rules, its economic activities (selling t-shirts, sponsorships, etc.), and its cultural relevance, to the concept of ‘football’ and then compare this concept to the one of ‘relgo’, we are converting the whole of football to its lexicographical meaning. There is, of course, nothing wrong with doing such a thing and it seems more than reasonable to believe that ‘football’ in the conceptual scheme of one society is ‘relgo’ in the conceptual scheme of another society. Concepts can be translated but social contexts cannot – this is how I have interpreted Willard van Orman Quine’s inscrutability of reference thesis (1960). The inscrutability of reference thesis is one of many commentaries that Quine made

regarding the limitations of understanding the meaning of sentences. This limitation is most evident when it comes to translation. Now, for Quine, it is not the translation between kindred languages, e.g. Frisian and English, that is of importance but what he calls ‘radical’ translation, i.e. the translation of a language of a hitherto untouched people (1960, 28). So for instance, a linguist visits a foreign society whose language had never been recorded before by members of western society. In his research, they both see a rabbit scurrying by and a native says ‘gavagai’ and the linguist notes down ‘Rabbit’ (or “Lo, a rabbit”). At first, we might be tempted to say that ‘rabbit’ is the English translation of ‘gavagai’, however, it could be that ‘gavagai’ translates to ‘white’, ‘lunch’ or some rabbit part (1960, 51). A similar situation is relayed by John Dewey in which among a foreign society, five or six boys are standing around, and tapping the finger on a table, the missionary John Weeks asks “what is this?” One boy answers that it is a ‘dodela’, another that it is an ‘etanda’, another that it is a ‘bokai’, the fourth says it is an ‘elamba’, and the fifth that it is a ‘meza’ (Dewey 1928, 345). At first glance one would think that the language of the natives is particularly rich in synonyms but it turns out that the first boy was actually referring to the act of tapping, the second was referring to the material the table was made of, the third thought the question pertained to what hardness was called, the fourth to what covered the table, and the fifth provided the word the missionary was actually inquiring about: ‘table’. What these examples illustrate is the fact that terms like ‘gavagai’ and their reference are dependent on a social and historical context and therefore, there is no such a thing as translation per se but an interpretation of ‘gavagai’. What does this imply? Well, if one accepts Quine’s thesis then the project of “transforming our language to accommodate the meaning [of foreign cultures]” (Hodder and Hutson 2003, 160) is impossible. No matter how hard we try to wrap our heads on this issue – meanings in foreign cultures will never have an equivalent in our languages. To return to the example of ‘football’ and ‘relgo’, when it is claimed that something “translates to…” one is bringing up the very

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common practice among western cultures of finding equivalent terms in different languages. So when it is said that ‘gavagai’ translates to ‘rabbit’ or that ‘relgo’ translates to ‘football’, we are making a common-sense interpretation, or in other words, we’re simply being pragmatic. As Rorty puts it, when translating ‘gavagai’ to ‘rabbit’ “[w]e are confident that it has nothing to do with inspecting two entities called ‘meanings’ and ticking off their resemblances and dissimilarities. It has everything to do with the relative ease of acquisition of the social skills promoted by bilingualism” (2004, 228). So Quine’s inscrutability of reference is correct in that translations of the sort ‘gavagai’=‘rabbit’ do not imply that meanings are being translated but rather that ‘gavagai’ is being interpreted as the term that natives use to refer to ‘rabbits’. This is what I mean when I state that concepts are translatable but social contexts are not. Concepts like ‘football’ and ‘rabbit’ say nothing, in themselves, about the practices that are associated to them. It would also be incorrect to assume that just because ‘relgo’ is ‘football’ that one automatically knows the social, historical, and economic context in which relgo partakes. Does relgo have a world championship that is played every four years? Are teams in relgo sponsored by big corporations? The fact that relgo does not have the same structure as football is one of the central points of Quine’s inscrutability of reference thesis. From the social, historical, and economic point-of-view, relgo is nothing like football. Therefore, one necessarily has to separate ‘relgo’ the lexicographical meaning and relgo (without the quotation marks) as a social, historical, and economic activity. With this argument, it becomes clear why in archaeology, namely in prehistoric archaeology, lexicographical meanings are not that important. Claims like “we do not know whether prehistoric societies separated the sacred from the profane” have to be seen in a different light from claims like “we do not know if whether prehistoric societies separated ‘sacred’ from ‘profane’”. In the former claim, one can separate activities that can be qualify as sacred and profane from a social and historical point of view. In the latter claim, one is speculating whether the societies have concepts that are

equivalent to the English ‘sacred’ or ‘profane’. Furthermore, in the latter claim one is wondering whether a given prehistoric society developed historically in a way that is similar to situations that we are familiar with, in which societies had separate activities, some of which are sacred, others not. As the football/relgo and the rabbit/gavagai examples show, there are two ways of thinking about interpretation – the semantic and the institutional. To a large extent, the textualist model of hermeneutics supported by Hodder is stuck in the semantic way of interpretation given that for him “understanding material culture is more like interpreting a language because it is dealing with meanings which are only loosely, if at all, connected to the physical properties of objects” (Hodder 1992, 10). In fact, this is still the way many archaeologists conceive meanings – as some sort of immaterial semantic layer that is independent form the physical layer of reality. Thinking about meanings from a social-historical perspective is to collapse the separation between the immaterial and material realms. This is not to say that meanings cannot be understood as what somethings means to a specific person (subjectivity), or that symbols cannot have multiple meanings, but I am reluctant in calling these ‘social meanings’ – I believe these subjective and ambiguous meanings are better termed as ‘hermeneutic interpretations’. It is in these latter cases that hermeneutics does have very important role to play since it was in the context of interpreting ambiguous religious texts that hermeneutics was developed (Descombes 1986, 21ff.). However, given that these contexts are not that prevalent in archaeology, hermeneutics actually has a rather limited use in archaeology. It is true that semantic meanings and social-historical contexts are hard to differentiate because oftentimes, the semantic meaning originates from the social-historical context in which a concept is used. To illustrate this, let us pose a question in two distinct ways: “what does ‘football’ mean?” and “what does football mean?” In the first question, the single quotation mark concern what ‘football’ means when the term is used in conversation – or in other words, what is it that is being referred to when someone uses the term ‘football’. In the second


question, the enquiry concerns not what football means but what it is. This might seem confusing because the answer to both these questions can be remarkably similar. For instance, one could legitimately answer both questions with “football is the game played by two opposing teams that involves kicking a ball with the foot to score a goal”. There is nevertheless a slight difference, from the perspective of the first question, the term ‘football’ is used as a referent to the sport that involves scoring by kicking a ball with the foot, in the second question, one is describing the sport itself. The problem of thinking in semantic terms is that there are as many interpretations as there are semantic meanings to a given event, process, or object. This problem is lessened when thinking in social-historical terms. So for instance, when historians were dragged into the debate concerning objectivity of the historical text, which was based on Jacques Derrida’s and Richard Rorty’s dictum that there was “nothing outside the text” (Zagorin 2000), they would provide rejoinders in the form of polemical historical facts that few would dare challenge, like the holocaust, for example (Evans 1989, 1997). Just like in the case of football, the holocaust does have a variety of semantic meanings as it represents very different perspectives depending on whether it comes from a holocaust survivor, a historian, or a butcher. But it is not the semantic meaning that archaeologists should be concerned about but the social and historical meaning. Unlike semantic meanings which are prone to misunderstanding, social-historical ones are generally indisputable because they are tied to intelligibility. What do I mean by this? Returning to the English scientist in Japan: if she goes to a restaurant while in Japan, even though she is unfamiliar with the language, the food, and the customs associated to Japanese restaurants, she still knows that a restaurant, in Japan, is a place where you can exchange money for food. No matter how outlandish the restaurant in Japan could be, the fact that she goes to a restaurant intentionally, with a certain purpose in mind, makes the situation intelligible to herself. In this sense, restaurant has a meaning that is indisputable regardless of how many interpretations one

can read into the actions and practices associated to Japanese restaurants. Let us imagine that the English scientist visits foreign culture x, and in this culture they speak English but their practices are sometimes very different from those of other English speaking countries. She goes to a place that has the word ‘restaurant’ associated to it. She goes in and realizes that not only does this place serve meals, like restaurants do, but it also sells children’s toys. Upon further inspection, she realizes that there are no stores in culture x dedicated exclusively to children’s toys, they only sell them in restaurants. In this situation, is the English scientist misunderstanding what a restaurant is? No. She knows what a restaurant is and she knows what toy stores are which is what allows her to intelligibly recognize that in this culture they have combined the two. For what reason has culture x combined restaurants and toy stores? Only history can answer that, of course. Do the members of culture x misunderstand what a restaurant is? No, because for them a restaurant is something that serves meals and sells toys. In fact, even if members of culture x were aware that in other cultures restaurants only serve meals, they can understand that this is a possibility – that there can be places exclusive for meals and places exclusive for toys. The fact that the English scientist and the members of culture x know what is going on means that they share at least a good number of institutions of meaning, e.g. knowing that a meal has transactional value. This is why the claim that “everyone interprets things in their own way” is not entirely accurate. So when Hodder states that “[t]he same straw hat means very different things when worn in a butcher's shop, in a punt on a liver, or on the stage with cane and spats” (Hodder 1999, 48) he is assuming that everyone reading his text already knows what ‘straw hat’ means because if meanings are as subjective as he claims, then Hodder’s sentence quoted above would be unintelligible. If for me a ‘straw hat’ has the same meaning as ‘automobile’, then I would not be able to understand what Hodder is trying to say when he states that a straw hat will have a different meaning when worn by a butcher. By making meanings both subjective and textually dependent, Hodder has created a

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situation where any form of interaction with unfamiliar situations would lead to complete unintelligibility. Comparison of any sort would be precluded as would any knowledge acquired outside the culture one grew up in. To a certain extent, everything is open to interpretation, but even interpreting requires being within a society that has created institutions which allow interpretation to happen.

5.4 the collapse and rebirth of the idealist / materialist distinction With what has been stated so far, interpretation can be several things but it cannot be a translation, unless one is actually translating lexicographically between different languages. Interpretation can be a process of hermeneutic reading – a reading of symbolic contexts that are, in fact, intended as open to interpretation and interpretation can be the understanding the social and historical context in which it makes sense to have acted in a certain way. Archaeologically, this means understanding a social process in its two facets – the social facet – which involves recognizing the relation between social members and the institution of meaning, and the historical facet which involves recognizing how these institutions of meaning came into existence. A posteriori, we already know that past societies involve institutions of meaning which is why we address these past groups of people as ‘societies’ and not just as ‘human groups’. An archaeology that claims itself a social science is one that recognizes the social interaction of humans and their creation of the legein and teukhein (Castoriadis 1987), however, from a practical point of view, it would be more accurate to say that the study of human societies is a historical study and not a social one. Why is that? As we shall see in the coming chapters, any assumption we might have concerning societies or concerning how we understand them is only that: an assumption, and not an actual explanation. Any question concerning the past societies which are object of our research can only be answered by the

modes of description – and not by the logical and/or ontological assumptions one might have concerning how societies operate in general. So for instance, to state that society x developed in the way it did because of the institution of legein or the institution of teukhein is wholly incorrect as that would imply that the institution legein or the institution teukhein are the cause for why society x developed the way it did. These institutions are not a cause – they are nothing more than our retrospective interpretation of societies. Unlike Hodder’s form of interpretation, which leaves everything open to judgement, the historical interpretation of the past is one that is objective – not in the scientific sense – but in the sense that the intelligibility of reality is dependent on the objective acceptance of some basic truths, regardless of whether these truths concern individual/plural objects (determinate) or concern social objects (indeterminate). As the social scientist I believe myself to be, the claim that society is ontologically sustained – whether it is through the critical sociology of Anthony Giddens or Roy Bhaskar or through the materialist ontologies of Bruno Latour or Gilles Deleuze – is a non sequitur because it matters not whether reality is material or not – what matters is how societies can be understood. This seems to be the lesson that the new materialists might have forgotten: in their effort to overcome the bedevilments of modernity (Thomas 1996, 11), namely, asymmetric dualisms like subject/object, nature/culture, and mind/matter (Witmore 2007, 546) – the new materialists have, as shown earlier in this chapter, retained and even re-emphasized the most recalcitrant dualism of all: the idealist/materialist dualism (Thomas 1996, 12). As Frank Ruda has pointed out, the old ideological battle between idealism and materialism has gained a new face through Badiou’s and Meillassoux’s interpretation of George Cantor’s set-theory which has given rise to new idealisms and materialisms within materialism itself (2014, 87). Ultimately, the materialism of the materialist archaeologists is a naïve one, one that hides an idealism within, and consequently, re-asserts modernist thinking in all its glory. As Žižek claims, today, it is idealism which emphasizes the finitude of our body and its


functions (2014, 5) and the speculative materialism of Meillassoux which emphasizes the end of that finitude (Meillassoux 2008). Naturally, I do not intend to present here disingenuous suggestions on how to overcome or even how to understand this new form of the idealist/materialist dualism – a task which, I believe, is best left to trained and experienced philosophers – because at the end of the day, what matters to archaeology is the past and its understanding. Does this mean that archaeology has to be either materialist or idealist? No, it just means that it does not matter. If anything, the idea that having an ontological foundation, whether it is meanings, networks, assemblages, or simply things, does not provide a deeper understanding of social reality as it is based on the false perception that ontological grounding somehow provides a more comprehensible or a ‘deeper’, and thus ‘real’ (Wallace 2011), understanding of reality. Ultimately, there is no ‘real’ reality behind the curtain and there certainly is no magic bullet which allows us to perceive this ‘real’ reality, or in other words, there is no materialist realm hiding behind a sheen of symbolic meanings, nor are there symbolic meanings hiding behind a sheen of physical illusions. Moreover, addressing meanings is not, in any way or form, an ontological commitment to an idealist nor a dualist way of reasoning – but ignoring the existence of meanings is. By choosing between a realm of material things and a realm of symbolic meanings, one is tacitly assuming that reality is divided into two

parts and that archaeology must focus on one or the other. If the new materialists are truly correct, the concept of ‘material’ would need not exist, i.e. if everything in existence is truly material then there is no need to distinguish the ‘material’ from anything else. There are no loose objects that are just meaninglessly floating in the world awaiting humans to imbue meaning into them – objects are expressions of meaning (Descombes 2001, 20). The material turn and its rejection of meaning is part of a larger trend that has already been identified by Matthew Johnson, a trend in which there is a growing disconnect between what archaeological theorists claim social reality actually is and how it can be understood (2006). This disconnect manifests in the following way of reasoning: “we can understand the archaeological record – because it takes form x”, or in other words, archaeologists assume that they can know the world because it ontologically embodies and essentializes set of key characteristics which are automatically knowable (relations, networks, materiality, agency, structure, etc.). Very rarely do archaeologists actually question how and why they can know and understand these characteristics, in fact, it has been philosophers like Alison Wylie (1989a, 1989b) and Peter Kosso (2002) who have had to critically assess our assumptions concerning how we can know and understand the past. With this topic in mind, let us look into why we cannot have a general notion of society before we actively engage with its understanding.

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6 ind iv i d u a l s a n d g e n er a l i z at i on s

6.1 collapsing the struc ture and the individual The discussion in the previous chapter on meaning and matter ended on the issues surrounding the disconnect between a perceived social reality and its understanding. As we saw in chapter 3, the idea of a society in archaeology is still largely dependent on the notion of agency and as we also saw, agency holds considerable limitations in terms of explanation, even though, when properly applied, it might yield some interesting ideas. For instance, Matthew Johnson describes that human agency can only be understood in the following way: “(…) human beings do not make those pots in conditions of their own choosing. Society is never a complete free-for-all; if it were, it would not be society. People are constrained by a whole series of different structures and structural relations, some technological, some physical, some social and cultural” (Johnson 2006, 122). Prima facie, this seems a very acceptable way of studying agency, a way which would definitely be of benefit to archaeological research. However, like the new materialist archaeologies addressed in the previous chapter, the notion of agency is predicated on a series of ontological premises which work against it. The issue is not agency itself because when defined correctly, agency can serve as a basis, much like intentionality, from which social action can be understood and properly described. The issue surrounding agency is that it remains dependent on the causal mode of thinking about past societies, a mode which forces agency to be viewed as the way for individual social members to emancipate (e.g. Johnson 2000). Once again, this might seem

like an appropriate way to address agency but this is at odds with a proper understanding of individuals. As we shall see throughout this chapter, the notion of ‘individual’, attractive while it may be, is more problematic than it seems at face value. In his landmark study, Fragments from Antiquity (1994), John Barrett put forward an interpretation of Southern Britain’s prehistory which tries to avoid the generalization of longterm social processes. The result of this interpretation was a clear and concise description of the institutions and lives of the people that lived approximately 5000 years ago in Southern Britain. However, while Barrett was decrying the trend in archaeology which sees everything as a general process, he remained trapped under the illusion that generalization is opposed to individual agential action (1994, 2–5). To be fair, this illusion was quite prevalent in archaeology during the 1990’s and was promoted not only by Barrett but also by other archaeologists through Braudel’s notion of duration, more precisely – through the idea that society is formed by structures of longterm duration (Braudel 1972, 1973), an idea which was supported primarily by Ian Hodder (Hodder 1987, Hodder/Hutson 2003). It has been noted that there is a big disconnect between the different durations and how they relate to one another (Hexter 1972, Kinser 1981) and it has also been recognized that durations are inadequate for certain archaeological periods (Kristiansen/Larsson 2005, 32). However, I will not focus on Braudelian durations per se, what I will however focus on is the notion of ‘individual’, which has served as the counterpart to long-term durations. According to Hodder, social structures serve as a constraint to individual action: “[t]he individual event takes place within cer-

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tain bounds set by the social conditions of existence and it is these constraints that Braudel (1973) called “social or structural history” (Hodder 1987, 5). Unlike Hodder, Barrett’s notion of structure relies primarily on Giddens’ structuration theory, and while there are remarkable differences between the notion of structure in Braudel and in Giddens, they are nevertheless both based on the principle that the short-term, the individual qua agent, and the event, are distinct from the structure (Barrett 1988, 8; 1994, 3; 2006, 202; Harding 2005). Like Braudel, who was the catalyst for the rise of a distinguished school of history in France, Giddens’ work set itself apart by reviving British sociology in the 1980s. Furthermore, like Braudel, Giddens also set himself apart by positing a set of sociological universals, a distinct ontology of society (Plesants 1999, 5), which could serve as a blueprint for sociological analysis. In this endeavour, Giddens produced some very compelling arguments such as, for instance, that sociological interpretation is only correct insofar as it represents the realm of actively produced meanings (Giddens 1993, 163) and the idea that the maintenance of society depends on the reproduction of social meaning by knowledgeable agents (Giddens 1993, 165). Moreover, in Giddens’ work, structure and agency are mutually implicated and cannot be considered independent from one another – this way of thinking about agency is also present in Barrett’s work and is much more plausible than the conceptions of agency, e.g. Gell 1998, which were criticized in chapter 3. In practice, many of Giddens’ ideas are readily acceptable and, as Barrett’s excellent analysis of prehistoric southern Britain in Fragments from Antiquity demonstrates, Giddens’ social theory is somewhat adequate for archaeology when properly considered. Although Giddens’ theoretical underpinnings do have its uses, his overall theory perpetuates some incorrect assumptions about how members of society interact. For instance, Giddens’ structuration theory (1984) is based on the premise that societies operate on a macro and micro level of existence in which the structure represents the macro level and the agent represents the micro level. The structure

is comprised of an organized set of rules and resources and is marked by an absence of subjects. The micro level is composed of the interactions of the agents which, unlike the structure, have a specific place in time and space (1984, 25). Society, as a whole, require the mutual constitutive relationship of the structure and the agents which together produce an ongoing historical process of becoming. Attractive while it may be, the presuppositions defended by Giddens are quite problematic, namely the presupposition which entails the existence of an ontological duality prior to the existence of history (Lucas 2012, 181), an assumption that is echoed in Barrett’s work (1988, 1994). What is problematic about this? Well, if we follow Giddens’ ideas we have to automatically assume that the structure and the agents are immanent elements of any and every society, even to humans to which the idea of structures and agency are unknown. It can be objected that both the notion of structure and agency do not need to be understood by the social members in order for them to interact as if they were agents, or in other words, agents can be ignorant of their status as agents (Bhaskar 1991, 50). If we accept that agents are ignorant of their status, we must also be open to the idea that any living being from the smallest mitochondrial cell to the largest sequoia tree also have agency, which as chapter 3 has shown, obviates the explanatory capacity of the agency concept. A second problem comes from the notion of structure itself, for instance, Giddens argues that structural rules can be contested by agents (1993, 50ff). By defending this position Giddens is wilfully disregarding Wittgenstein’s private language argument (2009 [1953], 95). Giddens does this by commenting on Peter Winch’s slight mishap in conflating rules and meanings (Winch 2008 [1958]). Now, from a Wittgensteinian perspective, it is anathema to have meanings just your own because meanings originate not from agents per se but from common understandings of the world. That is why it makes no sense to argue whether individuals stranded on desert islands can create languages, meanings, and structures because all those things derive their meaning from social activity; activity that involves at least two participants pace Descombes (2014, 328). To be fair,

6 Individuals and generalizations

Giddens is right in that one can abdicate following certain rules, contest them, and revolt against them. An example of this would be to brush your teeth with a sponge instead of a toothbrush. Giddens, however, is unaware of meanings as institutions, meanings which underlie social rules themselves. What does this mean? This means that to break rules, one must unavoidably follow an institution of meaning in which the social actors know what rules are – one must agree upon what is a rule and what is not in order to act in agreement with them or against them. For instance, the act of stealing something which is not yours forces you to agree with the institution of private property because without this institution, the idea of ‘stealing’ would be unintelligible. I find this misunderstanding quite recurrently in some of the circles I frequent: ‘Jane’ recently told me at a party that she does not listen to music that is mainstream. She does not consider mainstream music good enough and all she listens to is ‘underground’ music. I argued that there is a large portion of mainstream music that is quite good and that underground music cannot be better than mainstream music simply by not being mainstream. She did concede I was partially right but her demeanour revealed that this argument was more than just about music, but also implicitly about challenging the ‘establishment’ qua structure. Two comments can be made about this attitude: first, by only listening to non-mainstream music is it not the structure that is dictating what she should be listening to? Jane, of course, did not come up with the concept of ‘mainstream’ and ‘underground’ which means that she is still having the structure dictate who or what she listens to. Secondly, how do we know that this is not a way for the establishment qua structure (radio stations, record labels) to force people to adopt underground music? All we need to do is imagine a situation in which record labels decide to flood the radio stations and the internet with music that is intentionally terrible while at the same time putting out music of much better quality while hiding this music under the veneer of ‘underground’. Would the people who listen exclusively to underground music be challenging the establishment? Technically not, but they believe they are, not because of the specific agential actions of theirs

but only because their actions can be interpreted as a challenge to the establishment. Let us look at this in a different way: how does Jane know of underground music in the first place? Is there not a cultural and economic structure which allows underground music to exist? Underground bands still need guitars, drums, and microphones, instruments that are all made industrially and are economically accessible to underground bands. Furthermore, underground bands need to be known, they need spaces where they can present their music, like bars and small concert venues. Finally, band members need to know how to communicate with one another and with their public. This does not need to be verbal communication per se: band members need to know how to be coordinated while playing together. They also need to know that 6:00 in the morning might not be the best hour to hold a concert. This has some ramifications to Giddens’ structure-agency duality: resistance to rules is not a universal feature of how agents challenge the structure, it is an interpretation of how societies operate. For instance, if an ant, for some reason, crawls across the sand and traces an image of Winston Churchill (Putnam 1981, 1), can we state that the ant is resisting the social behaviour inherent to ants, by doing something no other ant has ever done before? According to Giddens himself, no, because the ant is not a knowledgeable agent: the ant does not realize that it just drew Winston Churchill in the sand. For human societies, this has two implications: first, people need to know what resisting means, and second, they need to be aware that they are resisting. Therefore, the act of resisting itself requires an institution of meaning without which the act of resisting is unintelligible. The structural rules Giddens refers to are based on what Charles Taylor has termed ‘intersubjective’ meanings which are those rules that are reached by ‘consensus’ (Taylor 1971, 27). Given that these are reached by the establishment of a ‘consensus’ social members can challenge these meanings because a consensus, which is a general agreement, can be disagreed upon. Institutions of meaning, however, cannot be challenged in the strict sense of the word. As the example of the British scientist in the previous chapter and the example of ‘Jane’

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and mainstream music illustrate, to challenge a consensus one must subscribe to set of meanings which are unchallengeable – one must recognize the institutions underlying the practice of eating out or listening to music in order to be able to challenge and reject these practices. In a way, the idea of institution of meaning finds parallels with Bourdieu’s notion of doxa where “[t]he instruments of knowledge of the social world are in this case (objectively) political instruments which contribute to the reproduction of the social world” (1977, 164). It is this underlying social world of institutions which Descombes calls the Objective Mind (2014, chapter 10). This objective mind is the world that binds humans in order that they may be free because all human action that is either constrained or free, determined or contingent, is only understandable by shared common understandings. Following Wittgenstein’s private language argument, any personal meaning must rest on the impersonal meanings that are historically constructed by a society. Assuming that Descombes, Wittgenstein, and Taylor, are correct on this issue, the idea that there is such a thing as a social action which is individual stricto sensu is impossible. Obviously, in certain cases it can be said that some people act individually, i.e. people who do things on their own or out of their own volition, but on the formal level of social meaning, individual action is somewhat of a paradox. In archaeology, this confusion manifests in the elision of agency and individuality, which has been shown to be incorrect (Hodder/Hutson 2003, 7), because, as some authors have pointed out, the notion of ‘individual’ is one that is historically quite recent in the western world (Giddens 1992; Handsman/Leone 1989; Hodder 2000, 23), i.e. it is historically constructed. There are several problems with thinking of social actors as individuals because based on the descriptions of individuals in the archaeo-

logical literature, the action of an individual is only individual insofar as there is physically ‘no one around’. That is why addressing Ötzi, the ice-man dated to 3300 to 3200 BC, who was found alone in the Austrian Alps, is so attractive to those who invoke individuality (Barrett 1994, 1; Hodder 2000, 27). It is easy to think of Ötzi as an individual but this thought is fragile as all one would need to shatter this idea would be to identify a second body with the same characteristics in the same location or in the vicinity of where Ötzi was found. Two people cannot be an individual and Ötzi would lose his charm. Of course, Ötzi is an individual in that he could probably think of himself as an individual ‘self ’7. However, knowing or presupposing that Ötzi knew that he himself was an individual ‘self ’ is not very useful information. A slave during the height of the Roman Empire might have also thought of himself or herself as an individual ‘self ’, distinct from other people, so having a sense of self does not really tell us much about the social and historical conditions in which past people lived. So what did individuality mean to Ötzi and ultimately, what does it mean for us to call him an individual? It cannot rely on having a sense of self, as that means nothing archaeologically. Is Ötzi an individual because he was some sort of rebellious outcast? We do not know if he was an outcast, for all we know, Ötzi might have travelled the same path he did, across the Austrian Alps, several times in service to his community. There really is not much we can say about Ötzi without entering the realm of speculation (Spindler 2001). I do not believe there is a way to think about individual actions that is not artificial and based on our modern idea of what being an individual means, because ultimately, individuality only asserts itself in contra-distinction to what somebody else is or does. For instance, the famous photo of the man who stood in front of the column of tanks at Tianamen

7 Having a sense of self means that a person could follow the laws of thought, namely, the law of identity. This law of identity is what provides people with the capacity to differentiate one thing from another. In human terms, this law of thought translates into the capacity to recognize that you are yourself and not another person.


Fig. 2 Man standing defiantly against the tanks in Tiananmen, China, 1989.

Square in 1989 (fig. 2) could definitely be interpreted as a manifestation of individual will but this interpretation would be different if the man had 2000 people behind him. Similarly, Picasso’s Guernica can be seen as a manifestation of creativity and individual expressivity but that interpretation would be different if there were millions of artists in Europe during the twentieth century, producing works of art in the same way that a pencil factory produces pencils. Let us think upon this for a moment: imagine that following a profession in the arts, e.g. a painter, allowed you to have a salary similar to that of a medical doctor or a lawyer, could we say that creating an original painting is an expression of individuality? If so, how does it differ from being a doctor or a lawyer? Doctors can perform examinations or surgical procedures that have never been done before just as lawyers can litigate in a truly original manner. When thought in this manner, individuality does not exist. A person that wears a suit, takes the subway, has a corporate job, marries and has children, is as much an individual as the person that gets tattoos, travels to Japan for four years, plays in a rock band, and sells self-made jewellery at the flea market.

Therefore, it becomes very difficult to differentiate agency from structure because there is no way to recognize when an agent is acting according to rules and when he or she is not. For instance, Johnson presents a very levelheaded explanation of how agency can be enquired upon, complete with an interesting casestudy pertaining to the fifteenth century (2000), but nevertheless, his explanation fails to establish an evident difference between structure and agency. As stated before, the individual is not something that exists independently of the historical context which emphasizes individuality and Johnson correctly points out that the Renaissance involved a new sense of the individual which was actively created (2000, 215). Now, Johnson’s case-study focuses primarily on Ralph, Lord Cromwell, who qualifies as a knowledgeable social agent according to Giddens (Johnson 2000, 216) and who, throughout his life, was in constant negotiation to establish his social position, negotiation which involved the rebuilding of Tattersall castle, in Lincolnshire. According to Johnson, when rebuilding Tattersall Castle, Cromwell was unconcerned with the architectural conformities of his time, having made choices which jarred with the castle’s original style (2000, 221).

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Prima facie, given the influence and choices made by Cromwell, he would seem to be a prototypical agent – or in Johnson’s words, a “selfmade man” (2000, 216). The question that we must now ask is: what were the actions that made Cromwell an agent? To this question, Johnson states that in the rebuilding of Tattersall castle Cromwell built “a tower to mark a certain form of lordship [which] is a recurrent motif of the period, part of an established symbolic vocabulary” (Johnson 2000, 220; emphasis mine). I find this at odds with the whole conception of what an agent is supposed to be, because at no point in Johnson’s description of Cromwell’s project is there any direct challenge to the social structure. In fact, if anything, Cromwell is a clear representative of the structure as he adopts, as emphasized in the quote above, an established symbolic vocabulary in some of the decoration. It could be objected that Cromwell manifests his agency through the individual choices he made, choices whose responsibility lie upon himself and no one else. However, freedom to choose does not necessarily imply a challenge to the structure. A person can enter a fast-food joint and make several choices off the menu but these choices do not mean the structure has been challenged stricto sensu. In fact, in this day and age, choosing to go to a fast-food joint, especially one of the mainstream ones, is considered the exact opposite of agency – it is considered establishment behaviour. In a way, by focusing on a single individual, Cromwell, a person who held some influence in the time he lived, is providing the illusion that he is an agent. But when seen from a different viewpoint, Cromwell is actually part of the structure. This problem has also been noticed by Marshall Sahlins when he asks by what criteria can we say when a social structure, as a totality, and when agents are active history makers (Sahlins 2013, 127)? This question finds no easy answer because analysing an agent is also analysing structural trends and analysing structural trends is to provide a general view of how agents are acting (Gallie 1964, 86ff.) It could be argued that this is precisely how the dialectic between structure and agency works, but the problem in supporting this perspective is that, automatically, any and every

social action can be considered a manifestation of either structure or agency, which would, of course, make these notions too diffuse to be of any use to archaeology, which Johnson, for instance, is against (2000, 214; 229). It is in this sense, that both Johnson and Barrett are still supporting a generalizing mentality. With this being said, both these scholars recognize how generalization can be overcome: through history.

6.2 causal generalization Both Johnson’s (2000) and Barrett’s (1994) case-studies are excellent sketches of historical descriptions of specific archaeological periods, yet both archaeologists are still somewhat stuck on the idea that there needs to be an ontological foundation on which history is possible, much like the new materialists. How is this a way of generalizing? Well, in the case of Johnson and Barrett, one can only understand agency because of its historical specificity, however, one can only understand history because it relies on the general assumption that all societies are structured and have agents. In chapter 1 it was claimed that both processual and postprocessual archaeologists are caught in a generalizing mentality and this mentality manifests in two distinct ways: on one hand, there is the use of abstract theory to explain a large number of disparate cases, as addressed in chapter 4, and then there are causal generalizations. Causal generalizations are explanatory and posit, in the case of archaeology, anthropological universals for why societies developed the way they did. These causal generalizations bypass history by assuming that history itself is a result of underlying causes or forces. Causal generalizations, like those implied in Giddens’ structuration theory, presuppose an ontological mechanism, a dynamic, a process, or a force, inherent to all or to a large number of societies. As stated in chapter 1, these theories are very prevalent in archaeology. For instance, in a review of the archaeological literature of 2010, Elizabeth Arkush described the state-of-the-art in the following way:


“[i]in 2010, archaeologists investigated diverse, multilinear human histories and disagreed about what forces shaped these histories most powerfully” (2011, 200; emphasis mine). This is the current state of archaeology – a science which assumes that societies are powered by mechanisms which in turn, produce histories. In a way, Barrett is one of the few archaeologists who has noticed this problem and his work is an attempt at undermining this view. However, even Barrett has fallen in the trap of assuming certain anthropological universals. If societies are, indeed, powered by inherent mechanisms and processes, we are forced to think of societies in causal terms and consequently, as permanently constrained. If humans act, not because they have historically created the context of their own social action, but because they are following behaviour dictated by human universals – then societies are stuck in an inevitable dialectic of constraint and freedom, i.e. all human action has to be seen as either the result of a cause or of personal choice. Some archaeologists have actually defended this view (e.g. Trigger 1991) but this is detrimental to the understanding of human societies. As Arkush states: “Hence, many archaeologists are dealing in some way with questions of how conditioned and constrained local and regional histories were—and by what critical factors or processes. Some stress demography, environment, and social or economic organization; others lay more emphasis on the construction of meaningful monuments and commemorative traditions. Meanwhile, much archaeological writing conveys a palpable sense of “affirmative action” in restoring agency to long-dead people, especially those involved in major transformations that outwardly appear monolithic and inevitable. The role of agency is a central question in studies of imperialism and colonialism, and it also informs bottom-up approaches to the adoption of agriculture and the establishment of inequality. How much room did actors of different kinds have to shape their futures and affect major transformations, and how much intentionality was involved? Broadly, our differences lie in the extent to which we

stress contingency versus process, and agency versus conditions, in the making of diverse human histories.” (Arkush 2011, 200). What makes agency and individuality attractive is precisely this determinist view of reality, which has been inherited from positivist philosophy and views the human as determined by both its internal biological processes and also by its surrounding environment, also known as the milieu ambiance in French and the Umwelt in German (Spitzer 1942). As Dornan states “the birth of agency theory has reflected a desire to counter deterministic models of human action by acknowledging that people purposefully act and alter the external world through those actions” (2002, 304). This begs the question: why reject agency if it provides the means to overcoming necessaritarian and deterministic views of social reality? First, in chapter 3, it was argued that agency in itself does not actually provide explanations as to why a specific human actions occur; and second, the relevance of agency dissolves the moment we rescind applying the causal mode of explanation to human social behaviour. By subsuming all that qualifies as social action under the teleological and narrative modes of explanation, the distinction brought up by Arkush between contingency (agency) and process (deterministic forces) crumbles (Castoriadis 1987, 44–45) Another archaeologist who has noticed the problems associated to causal generalization is Kristian Kristiansen. In preparation for the book The Rise of Bronze Age Societies (Kristiansen/Larsson 2005), Kristiansen went through some of the prevailing theories in archaeology, namely evolutionary theory and agency theory, in search of something that might be of use. His search led him to the conclusion that these theories were actually of little to no use for the study of Bronze Age Europe because “[t]hey both [Darwinian archaeology and agency] refer back to biological universals that fail to grasp the full historical and social complexity of the past” (Kristiansen 2004, 94). When Kristiansen states that evolutionary theory and agency report back to a biological universals he is partially

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correct, at least in relation to Darwinian archaeology. Agency, however, has no connection to biology per se, nevertheless, what Kristiansen is trying to say is evident: human actions caused by both biological factors or by agency are general ways of looking into the past. In the sequence of some of the arguments of chapter 3 – that all intentional action is external, and some of the arguments put forward in chapter 5, that meaning cannot be found within the minds of humans, it derives that the explanation of human action cannot rely on an understanding of humans as biological beings. This means that the social aspect of society cannot be understood through theories which are based on anthropological universals, such as those defended in agency theory or evolutionary theory. Agency theory has been thoroughly commented upon so I will not be repeating those arguments again, rather, I will focus briefly on another school of thought which is based on a set of anthropological universals: structural anthropology. Structural anthropology marked twentieth century scholarship in a variety of ways, but what we are most interested in concerns its relation to history. Overall, history held little to no importance to structural anthropologists with many rejecting it outright (Clark 2004, 42ff.). This fact might be related to a certain extent with the fact that structural anthropology is based primarily on anthropological universals. What are these universals? A look into Levi-Strauss’ work shows us his deep reliance on Sassurean structural linguistics, however, Levi-Strauss took his ideas a step further: “For the editors of the Course in General Linguistics, there exists an absolute opposition between two categories of fact: on the one hand, that of grammar, the synchronic, the conscious; on the other hand, that of the phonetic, the diachronic, the unconscious. Only the conscious system is coherent; the unconscious infra-system is dynamic and off-balance, composed at once of elements from the past and as yet unrealized future tendencies.” (Levi-Strauss 1966, 28). What is the relevance of the unconscious to Levi-Strauss? To a large extent, the uncon-

scious was Levi-Strauss’ way of overcoming the determinism implied in the empirical sciences and the contingency implied in historical particularism. For him, the presence of patterns of human behaviour, some of which he believed were universal to all cultures, had to have a basis on structuring principles (LeviStrauss 1969). This is not entirely unreasonable as humans are not, as Steven Pinker states, blank slates on which culture inscribes a set of rules (2003). The problem with Levi-Strauss’ ideas concerns where he locates the unconscious. In naturalist philosophy, like that of Searle (1998), and in Levi-Strauss’ structural anthropology, the unconscious is seen as something internal to the human. Once again, there is nothing inherently wrong in thinking in these terms, but that depends on what the unconscious is. Stating that the brain is something that is biologically internal to the human is uncontroversial, the problem lies in eliding social rules with the unconscious mind, and from there, eliding the unconscious mind with the internal brain. According to this logic, rules are perceived as something internal to the human. There are several problem with this idea: when we say that a certain behaviour has become internalized we mean that someone has learned to behave in a certain way, and through routine, has reached a point in which the behaviour has become quasi-unconscious. In a way, I believe the brain is largely responsible for this process as it is inherent to the human to be able to internalize behaviour. Here we must separate two different things – the biological capacity or skill to internalize behaviour and the behaviour itself. Levi-Strauss is conflating both the capacity and the behaviour and correlating the mind with both of them. How is this related to human universals? As Vincent Descombes argues, universalizing is an attempt to identify the common core that can put us all under the heading of ‘humanity’ despite the immense variability of human behaviour and institutions (2001, 48). Levi-Strauss does this by collapsing the nature-nurture into the single concept of ‘mind’ which holds the key to both biological and social explanations of why human action occurs. The problem with this type of reasoning is that it fails to realize that the world of state of


affairs is not composed of two realities, one of which is biological and another which is social. There is only one reality that, depending on what is being enquired, can be answered through different types of descriptions. Thus, the reality of institutions need not be posited on biology or anything else nor does biology need to be posited on social institutions. For instance, when we refer to an intentional action like someone deciding to go the bank, the description relies on the existence of a language that establishes the subject of the action towards an intentional object (Descombes 1986, 51ff., 1988), but at no point does the description rely on the fact that the subject needs to be a human endowed with biological abilities. What Levi-Strauss is doing when collapsing both the biological human and the social agent through the concept of ‘mind’ is trying to answer the unnecessary question: “how is human action possible outside a social setting?” Moreover, by placing institutions within the mind, Levi-Strauss has done something quite smart which is to avoid empirical scrutiny. As a concept-metaphor (Moore 2004), the mental structures that Levi-Strauss defends are precluded from empirical verification. There are several problems in thinking about mental structures, and we shall look at one of them: “What are the mental structures to which we have referred and the universality of which we believe can be established? It seems there are three: the exigency of the rule as a rule; the notion of reciprocity regarded as the most immediate form of integrating the opposition between the self and others; and finally, the synthetic nature of the gift, i. e., that the agreed transfer of a valuable from one individual to another makes these individuals into partners, and adds a new quality to the valuable transferred.” (LeviStrauss 1969, 84). Let us look at the first of the three mental structures that Levi-Strauss refers to: the exigency of the rule as a rule. In Levi-Strauss, this would refer to something like the universal rule that incest is prohibited in all cultures as argued in his Elementary Structures of Kinship (1969). As Roy Wagner has brilliantly pointed out, to recognize that incest is prohibited one

must also recognize what ‘incest’ means (1972). To wit, to follow the rule that incest is prohibited, there are other rules one must follow – the rules that underlie the structure of kinship relations, i.e. you know who is of kin and who is not, and the rule that sexual conduct must occur outside of that kin group, i.e. exogamy. Naturally, knowing these two rules must also themselves be part of the LeviStraussian mental structure as incest would be unintelligible without these two prior rules. This, in itself, would not be seen as problematic to Levi-Strauss, until we take into account intentionality. As we saw in chapter 3, an intentional action is not possible unless there is an object to which that object is directed towards. So for instance, the desire for sexual conduct requires an object that is external to that desire. This means that the desire does not come first, what must come first is the object of desire because without it, desire is unintelligible. This would then mean that a man stranded on an island cannot feel the sexual desire for a kin member, and consequently, cannot violate the rule that prohibits incest. Obviously, the fact that the person is stranded alone on an island would automatically mean that the person could not be able to violate this rule, but this example also points to something else: how is it that people who are living in completely different contexts have the same mental structures, structures that refer to completely different worlds? This question addresses the problem of translation as exemplified in the last chapter with the football/relgo distinction. Football and relgo are very similar at face value which is why we can, to a certain extent, consider them synonymous from a lexicographical point-of-view. They are, however, dissimilar in that they refer to things that exist worlds apart. What does this ultimately mean? Well, mental structures of one individual cannot be the same as that of an individual that is from a different culture because those structures refer to different things. In the previous chapter, I introduced Willard van Orman Quine’ indeterminacy of translation thesis (1960) which argues that it is impossible to know whether two linguistic expressions have the same meaning if they are in

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languages which are structurally different, i.e. which do not have a common basis like Frisian and English. The reason for this impossibility is because expressions in these languages refer to situations and contexts which themselves are untranslatable from one context to another. The football/relgo distinction of the last chapter is a good example of indeterminacy of translation. Given that expressions about the world are dependent on the world itself, it is easy to conclude that the mind cannot independently produce facts which are dependent on the external world. This conclusion was accepted by Quine as he recognized that his thesis was congenial with what Brentano had said many years earlier, that the intentional was atomistically irreducible to mental states (Brentano 2015 [1874]; Quine 1960, 221; Rey 2015). This was also the conclusion reached by Hilary Putnam through his famous “brain in a vat” and “twin-earth” thought-experiments (1973; 1975, 139ff.; 1981, 5ff.). Let us look at what Putnam was trying to argue with the twin-earth thought experiment: imagine that there is another planet out there, virtually identical to ours (twin-earth), where its inhabitants also speak English. Earth and TwinEarth are virtually identical except one peculiar difference: water, which on earth is H2O, is identical on twin-earth except for the fact that it has a different chemical composition which we shall call ‘XYZ’. People on earth believe that the oceans are filled with water, water corresponding to H2O, and on twin-earth people also believe that their oceans are filled with water, water corresponding to XYZ (Putnam 1973, 700–703). The problem Putnam illustrates with this example is that there is disconnect between the psychological state of a person and the sense of propositions: the people of earth state that H2O is water while the people on twin-earth state that XYZ is water: if the meaning of these statements is to be considered identical, then the external world is completely irrelevant – it can be said that H2O is XYZ. However, if we accept the fact that those two statements refer to different things, which they do, then we must accept the fact that ‘meaning’ refers to something that is external – i.e. it refers to the world of state of affairs, or in other words, meanings

cannot be produced in the head (Descombes 2001, 204; Putnam 1975, 144). Most of these ideas have been introduced in previous chapters but not their logical consequences: if it is true that social actions toward an object are dependent on the external world, then it is logically impossible to universalize causes for social action. Moreover, if we cannot universalize causes, we need to rethink what role history plays in explaining social action. For the structural anthropologist, the meanings are already pre-existent as a whole in mental structures and it is from these meanings that one structures social behaviour (Descombes 2001, 53). In history, meanings are not pre-existing, they are epiphenomenal – an outcome of historical circumstances.

6.3 the subject of triadic relations There are several issues that have yet to be broached: if there are no social structures per se, how do we talk about societies without reducing them to individual actions? For instance, when we say that Bronze Age societies had metal artefacts, we are not stating that the metals were property of the society as a whole, even though that could have been the case. We are also not saying that members of these societies are owners of metal, even though they might have been. What we are saying is that these societies had institutions which made all the social practices related to metal intelligible. Similarly, when we think of modern times, we claim that this or that society is scientific and secular while other societies are religious. For instance, Iran is what we would consider a religious state yet at the same time, Iran has a great number of universities and institutes dedicated to the study of science. Germany, a country we would consider secular and following a scientific world-view, has several churches spread throughout its cities. How then, is it possible to claim that a society is either secular or religious when these societies have elements that contradict those claims? This is due, in large measure, to the polarity created by


thinking in terms of a social totality vs. the individual. This problem finds a partial solution in archaeology through those who defend the intersection of micro and macro views of reality (Cornell/Fahlander 2002; Fahlander 2003; Kristiansen 2004, 94ff.; Kristiansen 2014, 16, 18; Pauketat 2001, Robb/Pauketat 2013; Sherratt 1993, 128), an approach that has been scrutinized quite thoroughly in anthropology (Marcus 1998; Moore 2004; Strathern 2005). However, this solution is only partial because this differentiation between the micro or macro views assumes that the micro view is based on individual action. For instance, Per Cornell and Fredrik Fahlander, following Sartre, state: “(…) there are always regularities and patterns in the social process, often centred on materialities. To illustrate his argument, Sartre discussed people waiting at a bus stop. These individuals are not integrated as a group in a strict sense, they are rather solitaries, united by a common pattern of action; they are waiting for a bus, to be transported somewhere. Sartre calls this kind of pattern a series.” (Cornell/Fahlander 2002, 24). Like the new materialists, Cornell and Fahlander presuppose that there must be a material basis to social action. However, as argued in the previous chapter, if the material-immaterial distinction is collapsed, there really is no reason to underline the presence of a material basis for regular or patterned social actions. Why is that? If we think of ‘individual’ as a social status, rather than as an ontological certainty, it becomes possible for institutions to become social actors as well. Anything that can act intentionally becomes an individual. For instance, a football team member that kicks a ball towards the goal is not a ‘solitary’ that is united to his teammates by a common pattern of action, especially if we take into consideration the fact that within a football team each member serves a specific role, e.g. goalie, striker, defender. This is very important because it helps us demystify ‘individual’ in the two senses in which we need to understand it: the individual

as an individual object and the individual as a social status. In football, any given team that is playing usually has a player which serves as the goalie. This role in a football team is individual whereas, for example, there can be several mid-fielders in a game. Let us ask the following question: what makes the goalie an individual? It cannot be his physical properties as a human detached from other humans, since anything and everything that can be individualized through the laws of thought can be reduced to an individual, e.g. atoms, cups, planets, Margaret Thatcher, windshields, etc. What makes the goalie an individual is his membership in a team. This apparent contradiction underlies most theories of identity – in that, on a social level, identity refers to the identification of one object as identical to another (Descombes 2016, 6–7). This is particularly evident when filling in a form that requires identification. For instance, if I identify myself as ‘Chinese’, a ‘student’, and a ‘karate practitioner’, these descriptors help other people understand what kind of person I am but none of them specify my individuality, much on the contrary: there are more than a billion Chinese people in the world, several million students, and several million karate practitioners so technically, none of these descriptors make me an individual, in fact, they demonstrate the exact opposite: they demonstrate that I share things with other members of society. It is in this perspective that Robert Brandom’s statement “[p]aradoxically, our freedom consists in our capacity to bind ourselves, to commit ourselves, to undertake responsibilities” (Brandom 2004, 248) makes most sense. What makes us individual, especially in the modern western world, is the institutions to which we are bound, institutions in which freedom of action makes sense. Without institutions, we are reduced to talking about humans exclusively from the point-of-view of individual and plural objects, as they were described in chapter 4. When we put more thought into the opposition between structure and agent, one of the sustaining beliefs that support this distinction lies in the fact that the individual must be a social unit within itself. This is, to a certain extent, what separates the methodological

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individualists from the collectivists. At its most simple, a methodological individualist believes that the individual human is the social unit whereas the collectivist believes that society is a collective of individuals. As Margaret Archer puts it: “Historically, the first two contenders locate these constituents respectively in 'agency' and in 'structure'. These are represented in the old debate between individualism and collectivism, which was already well articulated in the nineteenth century. Thus to J. S. Mill, 'Men in a state of society are still men. Their actions and their passions are obedient to the laws of individual human nature. Men are not, when brought together, converted into another kind of substance with different properties.'” (Archer 1998, 191). According to Archer, part of the appeal of methodological individualism has to do with scientific analysis (1998, 192), to wit, methodological individualists assume that reducing society to individual components allows an understanding of society in the same way that a reducing a car to its individual mechanical parts makes the understanding of how cars work a lot easier. However, it would seem that rejecting individuals from society would imply rejecting the capacity for the individual social actor to act – that every action is part of what a collective have decided. The truth is social action does not start with the individual qua agent and neither through the dictums of the collective qua structure. This, of course, begs the question: how is social action possible? As argued in chapter 3, social action does not ‘start’ stricto sensu, it is merely understood through our interpretations and explained through the teleological and narrative mode of description. For instance, in the previous chapter I provided the example of an English scientist going to a Japanese restaurant while in Japan. The intelligibility of this example derives not from the English scientist as an individual but precisely from something else – of her being bound up by a series of institutions of meaning. The example is only relevant because she is an English person in Japan, or in other words, a person that

was raised in an environment surrounded by institutions of meaning associated to the Anglophone world and then forced to live in a world where the institutions might differ, and consequently, to act in ways which can be understood by the Japanese. What matters are the institutions because without them, there is nothing to compare. Let us imagine that following situation: every single person in this world subscribes to the same meanings within institutions of meaning (this fictional situation is impossible but bear with me), which would mean that everything meant the same thing to everyone else. Everyone would eat the same food, have the same form of government, have the same type of house, the same name, the same nationality, etc. In this impossible scenario, the concept of individual, agent, and self, would be redundant because there is nothing that allows us to contrast one situation, event, object, etc. to another. Individuality and human freedom stems not from being an individual stricto sensu but from contexts in which things can be described as being different from something else. Therefore, when I state that I am Chinese, this qualifier only makes sense as defining my individuality because other people have also accepted this qualifier for themselves and others have not (Descombes 2016, 15). Just like the cat-owner example provided by Descombes (2014, 117), my being Chinese is a social status relative to other people who are not Chinese. In this specific case, the institution of meaning concerns the recognition of nationality which is an institution that has worldwide recognition. As a person who travels quite frequently, I do get asked where I am from quite often. Depending on what is actually being asked, I can answer with my ethnicity (Chinese and Portuguese), my birthplace (China), my citizenship (Portuguese), or where I am currently working (Germany). In all cases, these answers are satisfactory because we have institutionalized, at a worldwide level, the fact that there are different ethnicities, different citizenships, etc. I could go to Brazil, Canada, or Bangladesh, and state that I am Chinese and this would be intelligible regardless of the language involved. Of utmost importance is understanding that, unlike methodological individualism and


collectivism, institutions of meaning are not quantitatively dependent. All the modern examples I have provided so far in my arguments would still make sense regardless of the number of people involved. For instance, the English scientist example of the last chapter focused on one person, but the intelligibility of the example would remain unchanged even if I had referred to five English scientists. In fact, even if the English population moved to Japan in its entirety (approximately 53 million people), the institutions of meaning would remain unchanged. The English population would still identify themselves as English. This has several repercussions in archaeology – the most important of which is that when we talk about individuals in the social sense, one is automatically referring to institutions of meaning. As W B Gallie states “(…) human actions are performed and interpreted as expressions of generally accepted institutions, beliefs, routines and norms, quite as much as personal feelings and dispositions” (1964, 78). This social condition remains unchanged regardless of the number of people we address: it can be one person, two, five, 500, or 25 000 000 – if we are addressing people as social actors, the number is not important, what matter are the institutions of meanings that make their social life intelligible. Underlying this principle is Descombes’ anthropological holism (2014) which was introduced last chapter. In short, anthropological holism defends the idea that a social status is not dependent on a context where the entire body of knowledge of a given society must be understood (semantic holism), nor on the dyadic relation between a social member and a discrete object (semantic atomism), but rather on the recognition of the social status by other members of society (anthropological holism) (Descombes 2014, 116–118). The difference between a semantic atomist and an anthropological holist mirrors the difference between the causal mode of description and the teleological mode of description. A semantic atomist assumes the possibility of reducing social relations to one-to-one relations between social members and objects, in the same way that the new materialist approaches reduces social relations to a dyadic ontological contact between different objects

(Preucel 2006, 257). Similarly, the causal mode is based on the description of reality as a relation between objects as a one-to-one relation – which can also be interpreted as the one-to-one relationship between a cause and an effect. In opposition, anthropological holism presupposes that a social relation depends on the relation of social a member to an object and in addition, a third element: a second social member which recognizes that relation – or in other words – a triadic relation. Based on the work of Charles Sanders Peirce, which has gained popularity in archaeology in recent years (Barrett 2014; Bauer 2002; Capone/Preucel 2002; Preucel 2006; Preucel/Bauer 2001; Watts 2008), triadic relations are inextricably linked to a logic of meaning, in which understanding is obtained not by breaking down the relation to its constituent parts – but by recognizing the relation in the form of an anthropological whole (Descombes 2014, 236). Descombes’ take on triadic relations is complemented by Hegel’s notion of the subjective mind – and the objective mind it must rest upon in order for subjective meaning to be intelligible (Descombes 2014, 294). It is this lack of a differentiation of objective and subjective meaning in archaeology that has led to either a dismissal of meanings as part of the psychic life of humans which is inaccessible in dead societies (e.g. Binford 1965, 204) or that meanings can and should be studied through an empathetic hermeneutic approach (Hodder/Hutson 2003, 161; Melas 1989). This latter case is particularly problematic, as we saw see in the last chapter, because without a differentiation of impersonal (objective) and personal (subjective) meanings, anything and everything can be open to interpretation (Johnsen/Olsen 1992, 426–427). Unlike personal meanings, institutions of meaning are dependent not on the subject alone, but on the recognition of an institution of meaning by other subjects. Thus, while impersonal meanings are necessarily dependent on a triadic relation – personal meanings are the outcome of human authorship. A word of caution is necessary here: triadic relations are not, in themselves, a way of understanding social reality. Triadic relations are, like Giddens’ structure-agency duality, logical

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Logical necessity

Casual mode Teleological mode Narratological mode

Logical necessity

Explanation of Empirical Data

Explanation of Empirical Data

Fig. 3 Explanation in archaeology can be conceived in two ways: above, given that there is a logical necessity to how our understanding works, one can explain empirical data but only through difference modes of description whereas in the bottom, it is assumed that a logically necessary argument provides a direct and unmediated explanation of the empirical data.

representations of society8. Adopting a logical representation of society is providing a philosophical perspective on how societies operate but not how they empirically manifest. For example, this thesis is, to a large extent, logical in content. The reason why this thesis is logical is because it aims at elucidating the logical necessity of historical understanding. With this aim in mind, my aim is to take theoretical arguments and definitions and lead them to their logical consequence. These logical consequences never entail an empirical understanding of the world because as we saw with middle-range theory in chapter 4, it is impossible to ‘connect’ or ‘interdigitate’ an abstract object in the capacity of a theoretical argument with empirical statements. This leaves us with a dilemma, if theoretical arguments cannot be connected to empirical data, what is the use of theoretical arguments in archaeology? Theoretical arguments lead us not directly to the empirical data itself, but to how explanations can be constructed in archaeology. The modes of description are how we can mediate logically necessary arguments and the empirical data that is being described, so for instance, in this thesis I have logically reached the conclusion that social objects are irreducible and from this logical conclusion I deduce that the narrative mode of description is the only way in which social objects can be understood. Without mediation, it is impossible to understand how a theoretical argument explains empirical data, but this is in fact what happens oftentimes in archaeology (fig. 3).

What this means is that clarifying how we, in the capacity of scientists, reason or should be reasoning does not actually explain the empirical world. For instance, stating that a cause is always followed by an effect tells us nothing about the world of state of affairs. Similarly, stating that members of societies articulate themselves through triadic relations also does not tell us anything about the world of state of affairs. That is why there cannot be an archaeology or an approach which is ‘triadic’ in the same way that there cannot be a ‘cause-effect’ approach to archaeology. It can be objected that there can be an archaeology that focuses on establishing relations of cause-effect or an archaeology that establishes triadic relations, but these efforts are not actually answering why-questions, they are simply answering what-questions. Let us think of this in the following way: the act of gift-giving between two members of a given society is an example of a triadic relation (Descombes 2014, 244ff.), so if the question that is being asked is “what is gift-giving?” the answer to this question can be “gift-giving is a triadic relation”. However, if the question is “why do people give gifts?” the answer cannot be “because gift-giving is a triadic relation”. The fact that gift-giving is a triadic relation is in itself not an answer to a why-question. This is not to say that statements that are logically necessary are useless because they are not: statements of this sort are the way in which we discuss not actual phenomena per se, but how we can understand phenomena. In this sense, theoretical statements concern the

8 This is, of course, not how Giddens defines the duality as he believes that structures and agents are de facto ontological entities (1984, 3ff.).


understanding the world in terms of the meanings we apply to it. Given the popularity of theoretical arguments in archaeology, especially in the USA, UK, and Scandinavia, many archaeologists produce explanations that jump from a theoretical presupposition directly to the empirical data. Not only does this produce inadequate

archaeological explanations, it ignores the fact that the empirical data itself requires a mode of description, in which causes, reasons, or narratives are provided. The next chapter engages with this issue and argues why the narrative mode is the most adequate in providing explanations of social action.

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7 t h e h i s tor i ca l u n d er s ta n d i n g

7.1 modes of experience , comprehension , and description This chapter enters a new stage of the thesis, a stage which seeks to elucidate the validity and importance of the narrative mode of description in archaeology. As stated in chapter 1, archaeologists are familiar with narratives by medium of historical methods. These narratives are produced either through the subfield of historical archaeology or through the occasional use of narrative form in archaeological explanations. There have also been some very respectable studies concerning the use of narrative discourse in archaeology (Joyce et al. 2002; Pluciennik 1999, 2010) but unlike these authors, who have focused primarily on the advantages of narrative as a form of discourse or as ‘ways of telling’ (Plucinniek 1999), I intend to focus on narrative as a way of understanding historically. The previous chapters were crucial in pointing out the irreducibility of social action whereas this chapter is crucial to grasp how those social actions can be understood and it is in this effort where the idea of a historical understanding becomes meaningful. As stated before, social action must have a historical context from which its understanding derives and in order to achieve this, narratives in archaeology must necessarily be a truthful representation of things that are past. This statement hides a whole series of caveats that require elucidation. First of all, a narrative, in

and of itself, is not the past per se (Ankersmit 1983, 75ff.), however, neither is the past just some form of discourse that is imposed on reality. Historical narrative is a mode of description qua a mode of experience (Oakeshott 2015 [1933]) qua a mode of comprehension (Mink 1970). Whether it is termed ‘description’, ‘experience’, or ‘comprehension’, what is important to recognize is that a narrative, as understood here, cannot be reduced to words or to sentences. Like other social objects, the moment a narrative is broken down into its individual components, the intelligibility afforded by narratives is lost. Like music, narratives are composed of a series of signs put in a certain order, however, also like music, observing the way the signs are structured provides little information on what narratives are. Little can be gleaned by observing the internal structure of narratives9 for our purposes here. These ideas are very similar to those defended by Louis Mink in his paper titled History and Fiction as Modes of Comprehension (1970) which, in turn, is remarkably similar to Michael Oakeshott’s notion of history as a mode of experience (2015 [1933]). However, it seems that Mink was not aware of Oakeshott’s work at the time of writing because Oakeshott’s is not cited in Mink’s paper. Even so, the similarities between Mink and Oakeshott’s work are uncanny. For Oakeshott, experience is modal in that there can be three modes in which we categorize how humans relate to the world: the scientific, the practical, and the historical. The scientific mode, in a gist, is the

9 For an understanding of how narratives are structured one can look into: Barthes 1977, Genette 1980, 1988, White 1973.

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experience that quantifies the world (Oakeshott 2015 [1933], 132) which, as we have seen, is also similar to Castoriadis’ description of the set-theoretical way of engaging the world (Castoriadis 1984, 33; 209). The practical mode of understanding the world engages with practical facts, or in other words, with situations in the world which can be altered by human engagement (Oakeshott 2015 [1933], 202). Finally, the historical mode is one that requires an understanding of things that are past (Oakeshott 2015 [1933], 78ff.). Accordingly, Mink also has three modes of ‘comprehension’ which are the theoretical, the categoreal, and the configurational (1970, 549). The theoretical mode mirrors Oakeshott’s scientific mode in that it also concerns quantity – or as Mink puts it, the theoretical mode concerns “instances of the same generalization” (1970, 550). Once again, we have Castoriadis’ set-theoretical logic. Mink’s categoreal mode is the only mode that presents something considerably different from what Oakeshott offers. While Oakeshott’s practical mode concern practical experience and decision making, Mink’s categoreal mode refers to conceptual schemes or as Mink himself describes the mode, it is “a system of concepts functioning a priori in giving form to otherwise inchoate experience” (1970, 550). Mink’s last mode is termed ‘configurational’ and this mode relates to Oakeshott’s historical mode. In order to get a better grasp at this mode, I will cite Mink’s description: “Yet a third way in which a number of things may be comprehended is as elements in a single and concrete complex of relationships. Thus a letter I burn may be understood not only as an oxidizable substance but as a link with an old friend. It may have relieved a misunderstanding, raised a question, or changed my plans at a crucial moment. As a letter, it belongs to a kind of story, a narrative of events which would be unintelligible without reference to it. But to explain this, I would not construct a theory of letters or of friendships but would, rather, show how it belongs to a particular configuration of events like a part to a jigsaw puzzle. It is in this configurational mode that we see together the complex of imagery in

a poem, or the combination of motives, pressures, promises and principles which explain a Senator's vote, or the pattern of words, gestures and actions which constitute our understanding of the personality of a friend.” (Mink 1970, 551). Both Oakeshott’s and Mink’s schemes align with the scheme presented in chapter 2 which sees description as either causal, teleological, or narratological as we can see in fig. 4. The use of the terms ‘experience’ and ‘comprehension’ by Oakeshott and Mink respectively is indicative of the inalienable qualities that experience and comprehension must have. This, in turn, means that there cannot be a pure form of experience or comprehension – both the action of experiencing or comprehension must necessarily be modal. There is some similarity between these modes and Norwood Russell Hanson’s theory-ladenness thesis (1958), which argues that all perception of reality is also a judgement of that same reality, or in other words, there is no such thing as an unadulterated or pure form of reality to which we impute a judgement. However, I do not believe it is experience or comprehension itself that is modal but rather description. To make a judgement about reality is not simply to look, to feel, or to listen to something – but to provide a description of whatever is being looked at, felt, or listened to. Perceiving the past is automatically a process of description because there is no such thing as ‘perception’ or ‘past’ that is independent of our descriptions of it. In a world without society and consequently, without language, the concepts of ‘perception’ and ‘past’ are meaningless. That is why it makes no sense to state that an ant, a cat, or even a human stranded on an island, perceive something that is past because these beings do not have a language in which the terms past, present, and future, have a meaning. Naturally, not all perception is causal, teleological, or historical because causes, reasons, and stories are only relied upon when something requires justification. Thus, the causal, teleological, and narrative modes of description are not something that passively occurs to humans, they are actively pursued, and it is in this sense that the modes of description should

7 The historical understanding

The current thesis

Michael Oakeshott

Casual

Teleological

Narrative

equivalent to:

equivalent to:

equivalent to:

Scientific

Practical

Historical

equivalent to: Louis Mink

Theoretical

equivalent to: N/A

Configurational

Fig. 4 The current thesis’ modes of description, Oakehsott’s modes of experience, and Mink’s modes of comprehension.

be understood: as action towards understanding the world. It is also relevant to point out that the modes of description are not some sort of in-built capacity of humans nor of societies. The modes of description are also dependent on institutions of meaning and as such they are historically situated. Moreover, as dependent on institutions of meaning, the modes of description are indeterminate – they are not discrete items that have universal characteristics across the board. Finally, as dependent on institutions of meaning, the modes describe an actual external world, or intentional objects, and it is these objects of the world that shape the modes themselves. Perceiving an object does not always result in the justification of ‘why that object is’. Sometimes perceiving only results in the enumeration of an object’s physical qualities. So for instance, perceiving a lemon as something that is yellow does not require neither causes nor reasons, and thus, it would be incorrect to say that that the physical description of a lemon is a justification. Perception does, however, require the recognition of the object of perception, or as Husserl puts it, the “perceived as such” (Husserl 2014 [1913], 175) which means that the objects of perception require the laws of thought, to wit, perception requires being able to identify things from one another. This does not mean that lemons, for instance, do not exist unless there is someone to think of them as ‘lemons’ – what it does mean, however, is that perceptions are not intelligible unless one recognizes a lemon as an object. Pace Castoriadis, this implies “the continual capacity to make distinctions or to

act as if one were possessed of that capacity; it implies an ability, that is to say, of a kind that allows everything at which one ‘directs one’s sight’ to be adequately and sufficiently designated by means of speech for it to ‘enter the sights’ of other’” (1984, 209). In short, perception requires knowing. To be able to experience a lemon one must know about lemons. Obviously, a person that has never heard of or seen a lemon will recognize it as some sort of new undiscovered object, it is not, however, a lemon to that person’s perception. Moreover, to know something is to be able to express that knowledge. For example, someone that knows Latin, is someone that can read, write, and even possibly, translate a text from Latin – and to be able to do this requires not some cognitive state but the actual public act of reading, writing, and translating Latin (Descombes 2001, 13). Concomitantly, the causal, teleological, and narrative modes of description require the actual act of providing a cause, a reason, and a narration respectively that justifies a certain world of state of affairs. In light of what has been said so far, it makes no sense to argue whether narratives provide a true representation of the world or an ideal representation of the world. Whether it is through narratives, causes, or reasons, descriptions should be treated as what they truly are: descriptions. A description is never the actual thing that is being described nor should it be. Therefore, it is nugatory to argue whether narratives are faithful representations of the world. The argument that narratives are unfaithful representations of the world is posited on a

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rather obstinate but incorrect assumption that there is a pure and fundamental world from which different types of discourse is produced. For instance, philosophers of history like Frank Ankersmit and Hayden White suggest that narrative form is something that is produced from elements of reality, a reality which is too chaotic to be fully understood (Pluciennik 2010, 52). The idea that there is a reality that cannot be fully understood is quite confusing because it presupposes that there is such a thing as ‘full understanding’ of reality, an understanding which is unattainable. This begs the question: how is it possible to know that there is ‘real’ world out there if knowledge of it is unattainable and impossible to describe? Contra Ankersmit and White, there cannot be a ‘real’ world that is independent from our descriptions of it. Why is that? Because the concepts of ‘real’ and ‘true’ only exist in descriptions of the world, sensu lato. Therefore, it is meaningless to refer to the world outside of description as something ‘real’. The objective behind the narrative mode of description is not the real world, but to provide an accurate representation of the world, one that is not false/fictional. It is in this sense, and only in this sense, that the terms ‘real’ and ‘true’ make sense. Outside of speculative metaphysics, when someone asks whether something is real or true, one is actually asking whether a proposition is true or false, in the strict usage of these terms. As an example, if you state that you got drunk at a party, and someone else asks whether it is true or not, the question concerns whether you actually got drunk at a party or somewhere else, and not whether the proposition “I got a drunk at a party” reflects metaphysical reality. Berger and Luckmann state that “[t]he man in the street does not ordinarily trouble himself about what is 'real' to him and about what he 'knows' unless he is stopped short by some sort of problem. He takes his 'reality' and his 'knowledge' for granted” (1966, 14). Statements like this one are what support the idea that most things in reality are ‘socially constructed’ and these statements tend to be both metaphysical and epistemic (Nelson 1994). For now, let us entertain the idea that this claim by Berger and Luckmann on reality is metaphysical. On this issue G E Moore’s lecture about

external reality is quite important (Moore 1939). In this lecture, Moore argued that he could prove that there was an external world by raising one hand and then another and pointing out that there are two objects that are external to him. As Peter Winch points out, this type of proof of an external world does not qualify as actual ‘proof ’ in the same sense that rhinoceri are proof that animals with a single horn growing out of their snout exist. Moore’s argument was a way of elucidating what ‘external reality’ means to us rather than actually providing proof of an external world (Winch 2008 [1958], 9–10). If we follow the reasoning of Ankersmit, White, Berger, and Luckmann, it would be very easy to dismiss any form of objective knowledge of the world as all one would need to do is define reality as something else other than how it is commonly understood, e.g. reality is socially constructed, reality is composed of invisible and indivisible sub-atomic particles, reality is something that underlies materiality, reality is a form of energy, reality is a computer-generated illusion, and so on. Alternatively, by following Moore and Winch, we quickly come to the conclusion that there is no need to discuss reality from a metaphysical point-of-view because what matters is not how the reality manifests metaphysically, as long as we recognize it in a commonsense manner. Although it is essential to recognize an external reality (Bhaskar 2008 [1977], 12; Searle 1995, 8) it is not essential, to assume that reality must be intelligible outside of discourse (Winch 1964, 308). The reason why this is so is because the concept of ‘intelligibility’ is itself only intelligible within discourse. This is not to say that human and non-human beings without discourse are not intelligent, only that the concept of intelligibility makes sense when embedded in institutions of meaning which actually make use of the concept of ‘intelligibility’. From a disciplinary perspective, the three modes of description are ways in which intelligibility is achieved, but not just any kind of intelligibility, but the type which allows why-questions to be satisfactorily understood. As argued in previous chapters, this intelligibility cannot simply come from some statement of authority based on ideological preference


(sensu Bintliff 2011), it must be propositional in character – or in other words, it must be a description that can either be true or false.

7.2 historical past and the understanding of society As stated in the previous chapter, the key fact about social action in the world is that it is impossible to universalize causes concerning these actions. This is what makes historical understanding unique – each historical understanding must be measured in relation to the events, objects, and people, it refers to and nothing else. Thus, a narrative mode of explanation must be able to withstand evidential scrutiny and that is the difference between real narrative explanation and false or fictional ones (Veyne 1984). Unlike fiction, history must refer to what effectively happened in a certain place and during a certain time, and unlike the causal mode, historical events do not need to re-occur. There are two ways in which we can think of things that are past and both are essential to historical understanding: on one hand, one must realize that knowledge is always produced out of events, objects, and people that are past, on the other hand there is the discourse that demonstrates that these events, objects, and people are effectively in the past. If we accept causation as the constant conjunction of causes and effects, we must realize that causation can only be known by the actual observation of instances of cause and effect, instances that must have happened in the past. However, by accepting that similar causes lead to similar effects, we recognize that the verbs we use to describe a certain phenomenon can be tenseless, i.e. the sun rises in the east. The historical past however deals with events that are a fait accompli and as such, are sometimes evoked in the past tense, i.e. the British won the war. Opening any history book will reveal that most empirical scientists do not address their objects of enquiry in a tenseless manner nor do historians regularly address their objects in the past tense. Nevertheless, it is

important to recognize that the historian does differ from the scientist in this manner, and that the past tense is essential to the social sciences. As Wallerstein recommends: “First, virtually all statements should be made in the past tense. To make them in the present tense is to presume universality and eternal reality. The argument should not be made by grammatical sleight-of-hand. Anything that happened yesterday is in the past. Generalizations about what happened yesterday are about the past. This is perhaps a sensitive issue for some anthropologists (the famous “ethnographic present”) and most mainstream economists and sociologists, but using the past tense serves as a constant reminder of the historicity of our analyses and the necessity for theoretical prudence.” (Wallerstein 2003, 458). Naturally, the use of the past tense is more than just disciplinary fancy – it relates directly to the type of reasoning necessary for the narrative mode of description (Ricoeur 1985, 65). Is it true that empirical scientists and historians reason in a different manner? Naturally, this is a crude way of describing it but yes, there is a difference in the way scientists and historians reach an understanding of the world. Let me illustrate this with some examples: a doctor that is observing someone’s symptoms and tries to reach a diagnosis is observing symptoms that have already manifested. Similarly, a historian who is trying to reconstruct the events that led to a certain war is also observing traces of events that have already happened. What separates the two is that the doctor reaches a diagnosis by means of inductive and/or abductive reasoning. For instance, a doctor recognizes that a patient has skin cancer and by enquiring how this person led his life, the doctor concludes that he got cancer by being exposed in the sun too often. The conclusion comes in virtue of knowing that people with light skin who are exposed in the sun often and for long periods of time are more prone to getting skin cancer than people who are not often exposed in the sun, or in other words, this conclusion is obtained by assuming that the cause and effect of other cases of skin cancer are also applicable in this specific case.

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How do historians reason? Technically, inductive and abductive reasoning is ubiquitous and historians also use it constantly, however, the historian’s task does not end with induction or abduction, and consequently, a general cause and effect. Let us imagine the following situation: there is a history about a war and in that history, there is a great army commander who dies of skin cancer, which was the result of having lived a life constantly exposed to the sun. Consequently, his death led to his army’s defeat in the war. Prima facie, it might seem that the historian is following the same type of reasoning followed by the doctor but that is not exactly what is happening. In the doctor’s case, the question that is being asked is “why does this person have skin cancer?” but in the historian’s case, the question being asked is “why did the commander’s army lose the war?” which has an answer that cannot be reached exclusively by inductive or abductive reasoning. Throughout history, army commanders have lost wars due to innumerable reasons so there is no causal pattern from which one can inductively infer a conclusion. While the doctor infers that the patient has skin cancer based on how people generally get skin cancer, the historian does not infer how the war was lost based on how wars are generally lost. From here, there can be two objections: first, that even though there are no recognizable patterns of events that point to why army commanders lose wars, in the example shown above, there is an undeniable cause as to why the army lost the war and that cause is skin cancer; second, it is easy to make history seem unique by simply cherry-picking what questions are being answered and thus, the real cause of events can be hidden under of a veneer of specificity. These are two very good objections and are, to an extent, what gives credibility to the worldview defended by Popper, Mill, and Hempel in which the world, no matter how seemingly complex and specific, is actually supported by necessary causal laws. However, looking into these objections with a detailed eye shows that they are quite specious. In the first objection it is being said that there is an undeniable cause as to why the commander’s army lost the war and that cause is skin cancer and that without this cause, the commander would be alive and consequently,

would not have lost the war. This type of reasoning, while appealing at face value, is misleading because the reasoning does not state that the loss of the war was caused by cancer, only that the loss would not have occurred if the commander had not died of cancer. This type of reasoning is called counterfactual reasoning and as we saw in chapter 5 it does not actually identify a cause but only a condition without which an event could have occurred. Therefore, when it is stated that “if the commander had not died of skin cancer the war would have been won by his army” one is not stating that skin cancer caused the loss of the war but that history would have been completely different if the commander had not died of skin cancer. Of course, it is this difference that makes historians realize that skin cancer did play an active role in changing the course of history but what that course could have been is open to speculation. That is why, counterfactual reasoning is not enough to justify why something like skin cancer could have been the cause of the loss of the war. For instance, if the commander had not been born, the army which he would have commanded would be in the hands of another commander and thus, the outcome would also be different, but justifying wars being won or lost in this manner would be untenable. If I ask “why did the Seventh Coalition win the battle of Waterloo over the French army?” the answer could not be “because the Duke of Wellington was alive and in charge of the Seventh Coalition armies”. Similarly, the thesis you have in your hand would not have been written if I did not have at my disposal all the amenities necessary (computers, software, coffee) in order to write, but at no point would it be logical to state that my computer, software, and coffee are the causes of this thesis being written. The second objection is similar to the first, in that, there are true causes underlying the specificity of historical events. In this objection, the questions that are asked about the world do not matter – what matters is that the world, no matter how specific and unique it might appear, actually has a set of underlying causes which must be identified as the real forces of history. This would be a good argument if the underlying causes could actually


be identified when it comes to history. William Dray has shown that this objection has serious flaws (1957, Kelley/Hanen 1988, 182). Like the answer to the first objection, the answer to the second objection runs along similar lines but to it we also add a more human element. As Dray argues, explanations in history do not need a causal law nor does it even need to be probable because when we are dealing with human societies, we are dealing with objects that are social and that have no direct correlate in the natural world. So when Hempel claims that there is a law underlying why the Dust Bowl farmers migrated to California, which is the law that “populations will tend to migrate to regions which offer better living conditions” (Hempel 1942, 41), Hempel is purposefully dismissing what California meant to the Dust Bowl farmers. For Dray, understanding why California was the target destination of the Dust Bowl farmers is what makes historians empathetic to their objects of enquiry (1957, 117ff.). Once the object of enquiry are humans, in the capacity of social beings, the answer to why-questions cannot be accounted by causal explanations. Dray defends this principle by referring to the case of Louis XIV, who died unpopular for having pursued policies which were detrimental to his subjects. As Dray points out, prima facie, it seems that anyone that makes such a claim would be committed to the law that states “any ruler who pursues policies which are detrimental to its subjects will die unpopular”. But following such a law would forcefully exclude all and every detail about Louis XIV’s policies, the state of France at the time, and the actual history that led Louis XIV to the position he was in (1957, 36). If we take the details into account, assuming that anyone who pursued the policies as those of Louis XIV would also become unpopular is impossible to ascertain because there was no other ruler in the past, nor will there be in the future, that is in the exact same position as

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Louis XIV. This means that there could not be a ruler that followed the exact same policies as those enacted by Louis XIV. To play Devil’s advocate, let us imagine that there was, indeed, during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, a ruler in a province of China that followed exactly the same policies as those enacted by Louis XIV. In this scenario, can it be claimed that the Chinese ruler died unpopular? It is impossible to tell given the Chinese ruler’s policies alone because the policies might have actually led the province to great productivity and richness. The policies of this Chinese ruler could have followed those of a previous ruler which were actually much more detrimental. It could also have been the case that the province was going through a period of great prosperity, and even though the ruler followed bad policies, it did not have an impact on the happiness of the population. In short, there are so many scenarios in which the policies of Louis XIV, in the hands of another ruler, could had led to completely different outcomes which ultimately means that a certain historical fact about a given society requires history itself in order to be understood. A pertinent question that arises concerning these issues is: if we ignore causes altogether, how is it possible to claim that the policies of Louis XIV were what led to his unpopularity? It is this important question that justifies this whole thesis and the answer, by this point, should be clear: it made sense10 for him to be unpopular at the time of his death. At first, to say that it made sense for Louis XIV to be unpopular might seem like a subtle way to hide a cause under a different term but ultimately, it is not. According to what has been stated in the previous chapters, something only makes sense because there is a context that elucidates what that sense is. So for instance, it made sense for Louis XIV to have been unpopular because there was a context in which his policies could be seen as detrimental to the interests of the French population.

states that this idea can be converted into a general principle through which the agent is con ceived as a ‘rational’ actor when faced with a choice (1965:470-471). However, as Kelley and Hanen demonstrate, Hempel criticism does not lead anywhere as he provides no explanation as to what counts as ‘rational’ actions (1988:189).

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This brings us back to the notion of empathy – being able to understand why the French population considered Louis XIV requires understanding the population itself according to Dray but this is where some confusion might arise. As Hempel notes, by following the method of empathy the historian traditionally: “(…) imagines himself in the place of the persons involved in the events which he wants to explain; he tries to realize as completely as possible the circumstances under which they acted, and the motives which influenced their actions; and by this imaginary self-identification with his heroes, he arrives at an understanding and thus at an adequate explanation of the events with which he is concerned.” (Hempel 1942, 44) To a certain degree, this is, very succinctly, how R. G. Collingwood defines his historical method (1946). However, as Hempel also claims, this is more of a ‘psychological hypothesis’ than it is an actual explanation (1942, 44) and on this issue, I have to agree with Hempel. Why can a psychological hypothesis not be a form of explanation? By following Collingwood and his empathetic method, we are also subscribing to the principle that the human mind is what gives humans purposive actions: “History, then, is not, as it has so often been mis-described, a story of successive events or an account of change. Unlike the natural scientist, the historian is not concerned with events as such at all. He is only concerned with those events which are the outward expression of thoughts, and is only concerned with these in so far as they express thoughts. At bottom, he is concerned with thoughts alone; with their outward expression in events he is concerned only by the way, in so far as these reveal to him the thoughts of which he is in search.” (Collingwood 1946, 217). For Collingwood, the mind was the way in which one could get ‘inside of events’. To describe a historical event from the outside is to describe it merely through the bodily movements of the actors involved, but the inside is to understand the reasons behind which

someone acted (Collingwood 1946, 213). For Collingwood, to understand a reason is to understand someone’s state of mind when he chose to act. This outside and inside of events is not tenable for reasons we have noted in chapter 5 and 6: it perpetuates the idealist/materialist dualism. By maintaining this dualism, Collingwood has left himself open to the criticism that the historian is endowed with telepathic powers that allow him to read the minds of past people (Gardiner 1952), or in other words, a psychologist of the past. As a follower of Collingwood, Ian Hodder was also not exempt of such criticism (Barrett 1987). As Chapter 2 and 3 argued, the intention to act is one that necessarily requires an intentional object – one that is not created internally through the brain. As such, the mind Collingwood refers to is not an internal mind but an external and objective one, or in other words, an institution of meaning. What this means is very simple: historical actors act, not according to their thoughts per se, but in accordance with history itself. Let us clarify: when we say that a person acts upon a thought, that person is not acting upon something that was created by his or her own brain. By following a thought, a person is acting in accordance to something that is created in society, something that developed historically. So when someone wakes up early on a morning to attend Mass, that person is behaving in a way dictated by the Church he or she follows and to understand why the Church dictates these rules of practice, one must know how the Church developed through time. The belief system of a person, whether it is understood through Giddens’ notion of structure or Braudel’s notion of mentalité, is insufficient to justify human action. When trying to understand why someone acted the way they did, one has to look at the historical context in which the action in question makes sense, or in other words, there is a narrative intelligibility in which one can understand human action.


7.3 understanding contexts and games There are still some relevant issues concerning historical understanding which require elucidating. From what was said above, it seems clear that historical understanding can only be applied to things past and not the present or the future. This is not because history is written with the use of the past tense – the past tense is used because the understanding one is trying to convey concerns what has actually happened in the past. However, it can be argued that fictional novels, by also following the narrative mode of description, is a discourse about the past. This is true but the novel does not address a past that is evidentially true, it addresses a fictional past. As Collingwood and Veyne observe, the historian’s and the novelist’s task produce narratives, but the historian’s narrative must be true (Collingwood 1946, 246; Veyne 1984, 11). Translated into archaeology, narratives would have to rely on established facts. For instance, understanding the rise of pottery technology requires knowing that the pottery was used by mobile hunter-gatherer groups in China, some 19 000 to 20 000 years before present (Wu et al. 2012). Facts such as these are of vital importance to archaeology as they are the first part towards comprehending what it means for a narrative to be a true account of the past. So in order for the narrative mode of description to be effective in archaeology we need it to be a discourse about the past and it needs to be based on evidence (Appleby/ Hunt/Jacob 1994; Evans 1997). There is no mechanism through which a narrative discourse is formed. For instance, when writing a narrative, a historian does not identify the objects of enquiry in the present and follow through by linking those objects to the past by medium of narrative of discourse. History is not a re-construction of the past (Clark 2010) – it is an understanding and as such, the idea that narratives are built out of elements of the real world, to which we then add the qualifier ‘past’, is clearly untenable. In order to grasp this idea more clearly let us separate the type of understanding conveyed and obtained from narratives and the

discourse it produces. While these two elements are inseparable, it is important to realize that the discourse exists in virtue of the understanding and not the other way round. Why is that? It would be rather astonishing, if somehow someone would start writing or speaking and only after having written or spoken, realizing that it was in narrative form. Historically, and as an institution itself, the act of producing narratives started off as naïve (Oakeshott 1991, 99–101) in that people did not know at the time that the way they were addressing reality was to become what became later known as narrative. Now, this does not mean that today, when someone produces a narrative, that it is free from intention. This is a central aspect of narrative as an institution of meaning – narration can only be understood because humans, as members of society, actively pursue the act of narrating. When thought of as discourse, it is undeniable that there is, in fact, a strong correlation between historical narratives and fictional narratives. As a form of understanding, there is a clear difference between the two which is exactly why we rarely confuse them. In terms of discourse, I agree with Louis Mink and Hayden White in their argument that historical narrative does borrow some of the ‘artifices’ that are used in literature (Mink 1981, White 1973, 1987). But in no way can it be said that due to the resemblance to literature, and the aesthetic dimension required by literature, that history is nothing more than a form of emplotment through rhetorical devices, as suggested by Hayden White (1973). Much on the contrary, literature and history both provide understandings of reality. If social groups of the Palaeolithic or of the European Bronze Age were endowed with written language and through that written language could produce what we today consider a fictional novel, archaeologists and historians would still read them in an effort to understand the lifestyle of past societies. The Odyssey and the Iliad are two examples of narratives that are not read literally today, but that nevertheless help us obtain insights into the lives of ancient Greek populations (Ginzburg 2012). This is, in a way, what is demonstrated in Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis (2003 [1953]). For instance, in Chapter 18, Auerbach recounts an

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incident from Stendhal’s 1830 novel Le Rouge et le Noir. This novel focuses on Julian Sorel, the protagonist of the novel, who through a series of events, finds himself in the employment of Marquis de la Mole, in Paris. The incident in question involves Sorel asking Abbé Pirard whether it is necessary for him to dine with the Marquise, the Marquis’s wife, on a daily basis, a task which he finds very dull. Unbeknownst to Sorel, Mathilde, the Marquis’s daughter, was right behind him and overheard his request which, of course, leaves Sorel rather embarrassed. For Mathilde, this incident would change her view of Sorel whom she began looking at with more esteem because the request was proof that Sorel was not trying to indulge her or her father. As a novel, Le Rouge et le Noir is fictional but nevertheless, it is an attempt at mimicking the past, not in the same way as a historical narrative, but as a narrative of what could have been true. As such, the incident involving Sorel needs to be understood in the context of “the political situation, the social stratification, and the economic circumstances of a perfectly definite historical moment, namely that in which France found itself just before the July Revolution” (Auerbach 2003 [1953], 455). Without understanding the historical context, it would be quite difficult to understand why Sorel finds his dinner evenings with the Marquise so boring. Auerbach explains: “Even the boredom which reigns in the dining room and salon of this noble house is no ordinary boredom. It does not arise from the fortuitous personal dullness of the people who are brought together there; among them there are highly educated, witty, and sometimes important people, and the master of the house is intelligent and amiable. Rather, we are confronted, in their boredom, by a phenomenon politically and ideologically characteristic of the Restoration period. In the seventeenth century, and even more in the eighteenth, the corresponding salons were anything but boring. But the inadequately implemented attempt which the Bourbon regime made to restore conditions long since made obsolete by events, creates, among its adherents in the official and ruling classes, an atmosphere of

pure convention, of limitation, of constraint and lack of freedom, against which the intelligence and good will of the persons involved are powerless.” (Auerbach 2003 [1953], 455–456). The contextual information Auerbach provides us here, and throughout the chapter, is an excellent representation of what Descombes describes as narrative intelligibility (2001), in that the request made by Sorel is only fully understandable when aligned with what was happening in France shortly after the July Revolution, and it is in this sense that, like historical narratives, fictional narratives are dependent on the temporal understanding one obtains from recognizing actions in a historical manner (Ricoeur 1985). If the narrative mode is determined by its understanding, how does one know where and when it must start and end? Well, there is no way of assigning a priori boundaries to a narrative because that depends on the question that is being asked. For instance, if a man needs to justify why he is drunk he can narrate the sequence of events that led him to be drunk and this sequence of events might refer to no more than five or six hours in which the events unfolded. If the question concerns why there is an ongoing war in a certain region of the world, one might have to refer to 50 or 60 years’ worth of history in order that the reasons for the war are fully understood. Furthermore, one must also assume that the readers or listeners of a narrative already know or presuppose something about the past because without this knowledge, any history that does not link back to the beginning of time would be incomplete. It is interesting to notice that the interest in historical narration in the second half of the twentieth century, came primarily from analytical philosophers like W. B. Gallie (1964), Morton White (1965), and Arthur Danto (1985), while in continental scholarship, the interest in narrative came primarily from literary criticism. For the analytical philosophers, there was some legitimacy in comparing history to a story (Danto 1985, 111; Gallie 1964, 22ff.). For instance, in his description of story, Gallies states that:


“Following a story is, at one level, a matter of understanding words, sentences, paragraphs, set out in order. But at a much more important level it means to understand the successive actions and thoughts and feelings of certain described characters with a peculiar directness, and to be pulled forward by this development almost against our will: we commonly appreciate, without needing to articulate to ourselves, many of the reasons and motives and interests upon which the story's development up towards its climax depends. It is only when things become complicated and difficult – when in fact it is no longer possible to follow them – that we require an explicit explanation of what the characters are doing and why.” (Gallie 1964, 22). In this description, the most important word is ‘follow’, which Gallie highlighted himself. The reason why it is important is because a historical understanding is the capacity to follow the actions and experiences of people that a narrative describes. Let us pursue this idea with an analogy that Gallie himself provides, that of a cricket match. In a cricket match, the attending audience will have different perceptions of how the game operates, from the youngsters who know the basic rules to the expert who is a complete master of the rules and even know the strengths and weaknesses of the teams, in detail. Although it is clear that most attendees will be able to follow the game, it is clear that depending on technical knowledge, judgement, and experience, the expert will have a far deeper understanding of how the game develops in contrast to the youngsters (1964, 34). There are some similarities between this analogy and that of the football/relgo from chapter 5, and in a way, they are both promoting the same idea but through different words. In a gist, the actions of the characters of the story only make sense if you know the rules of the game. These rules, of course, are based on institutions of meaning. To act within a society is to have reasons to act and this is why, like a game, society is composed of actors who are teleologically directing their actions (Gallie 1964, 38). It is in this way, that like a game, a society can be conceived as a functionalist

system (Taylor 1964) in which actions have a meaning. However, the game analogy can only take us so far because societies are much more complex than a game. In fact, a better analogy would be to understand societies as multiple games being played simultaneously. Thus, the narrative mode of description, when applied to archaeology, is not simply a narration of the events occurring in a game – it is a description of the game itself in which it makes sense to play in a certain way. The only resemblance narration in archaeology has with fictional narratives is that there is an awareness of temporal coherence. What does this mean? Jan Harding for instance, emphasizes how “interpretation should be problem-orientated, focusing on particular questions about the origin, reproduction and transformation of individual institutions, practices and material culture” (2005, 98). What Harding is pointing out is that understanding must rely on the interpretation of the elements, which in our case are institutions of meaning, which provide the sense for social action. For example, understanding why a person received his or her salary at the end of the month is inextricably linked to the social context in which professions, employment, and money are intelligible. Moreover, this intelligibility is narrative in that professions, employment, and money, are social objects which develop historically through time.

7.4 history as the objective understanding of the past In the past years, I have introduced several of these ideas to colleagues and friends and they have consistently objected that archaeology cannot rely on the narrative mode because narratives only describe, they do not explain. Additionally, they state that given the fragmentary nature of the archaeological record, a record which is not as ‘complete’ as that provided by historical documents, archaeological theories are necessary in order to ‘fill in the gaps’ which are missing in our understanding of the past.

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I find objections of this sort rather disconcerting because they are based on fallacious forms of reasoning. First of all, the objection that narrative is descriptive is based on the erroneous notion that the narrative mode is nothing more than a diachronic retelling of past events. This type of narrative is of course an important component to understanding the past and in a way it is, indeed, nothing more than description because it is not actually answering a why-question, it only answers what-questions11 (see Dray 1959). In order for a narrative to become a valid form of explanation, it needs to provide information as if a why-question was being asked. For example, asking the question “what happened in Attica during the fourth century BC?” is a question that could be answered through very basic and standard narrative descriptions of past events. Unlike answers to why-questions, the answers to these type of what-questions are unlimited in that there is an infinite number of ways to answer these questions. Naturally, the question “what happened in Attica during the fourth century BC?” seems, prima facie, like a question concerning what was happening in general in Attica in the fourth century BC and not what was happening to each individual person in Attica, but truthfully, it is impossible to really know exactly was is being demanded from such a question. A good answer to this type of question is one that can describe as much of what was actually going on. As we saw in chapter 3, answering a why-question which concerns social action must take into account why a person or a group of people intentionally act in the way they did. Unlike a what-question which can be answered by description, a why-question of this sort requires a narrative which provides the context in which it would have made sense to act. For instance, in chapter 9 I provide a non-causal explanation as to why ancient Greeks practiced magic which, of course, cannot just rely on description of Greek magical practices – it must relay what happened in

Greek history in order for the Greeks to have understood those practices as magical, and not something else. The second objection, which claims that the archaeological record is too fragmentary for narrative type explanations, is the logical consequence of the first. Once again, this objection is only valid if we are assuming that narratives are descriptive and not explanatory. As the objection goes, the general theories which are used in archaeology provide a much better coverage because theories are based on regularities which allow us to capture complete social processes even when the archaeological record is found lacking (Barrett 1994, 1). Besides the counter-arguments I have provided in previous chapters against theories which generalize, this idea is posited on a fallacy. When it is argued that the archaeological record is too fragmentary, it is assumed that the past is some form of complete image on a box of a puzzle and the archaeological record is a handful of pieces of the puzzle. It is only in this sense that the statement “the archaeological record is too fragmentary” is intelligible. A cursory look into the Oxford English dictionary shows that the meaning of ‘fragmentary’ is “[c]onsisting of small disconnected or incomplete parts”. Now, let us entertain the idea that the past is, indeed, a complete picture – if this is true, then general theories are of considerable less value to archaeology because theories are not pieces of the puzzle at all – general theories are not even about the past – which is why they are ‘general’. Let me provide an example of what I mean: in January of 2007 I packed my bags and left Portugal in direction to Ireland to work as an archaeologist. I left in a hurry and had little time to tell my colleagues and friends and this left them wondering where I had gone to. During the year and a half I was away, my colleagues and friends could only speculate on where I was and what I was doing. Naturally, my closer friends, based on what they knew about me, could surmise my whereabouts and

11 Actually, answers to what-questions can also be conceived as explanations, when a general concept is used to justify an event. For instance, if someone asks “what happened?”, the answer could be “a revolution” – which, as a general concept, provides enough content for an explanation (Dray 1959).


my decisions with some degree of accuracy. None of these friends relied on ‘theory’ in order to explain what had happened to me – all of them, even those who did not know me that well, based their speculations on my past history because it is only by knowing something about my past that they were able to create a realistic narrative of what happened. My close friends knew that I was fluent in English, they also knew that I had family living in the British Isles, they also knew that I liked visiting the British Isles, and they also knew that many archaeologists had gone to Ireland in search of work – and many of them correctly guessed that I had gone to Ireland. General theories might provide us with information concerning why people migrate for work in general but they fail to answer why Ireland was my intended destination. Australia, Morocco, Angola, and Brazil, were also potential destinations as these countries were also hiring archaeologists at the time. Nevertheless, I chose Ireland. As some of the readers might have already guessed, the reason I chose Ireland was because going to work in Ireland did not require a working visa because Portugal and Ireland are countries within the EU and have a policy of open borders when it comes to travel and work. However, I would have needed to apply for work visa if I had intended to go to Australia, Morocco, Angola, or Brazil, a type of visa which is not so easy to obtain. So my choice was influenced by how easy it was at the time to enter the Irish workforce, something that no general theory could have taken into account because it requires understanding the specific policies in effect in Europe at the time. These policies are like Gallie’s rules of a game and it is only by understanding how and why these rules came into effect that one can truly understand why I chose to go to Ireland for work. There could have been no possible way in which to guess my whereabouts if one was relying on general theories which means that these theories do not, in any way or form, “fill in the gaps” of the archaeological record. As Johnson argues, there is a disjuncture between what archaeological theorists claim

they are doing and what is actually being done (2006, 188) and this provides an image of a discipline in which “(…) very often, archaeological theorists (…) can appear as hypocrites. The case studies offered in support of a particular theoretical position frequently do not match up to the claims made about them in the preceding theoretical excursus” (Johnson 2006, 119). The image of archaeology described by Johnson is rather worrying because in recent decades, archaeology has developed the illusion that general theories explain the archaeological record when in many cases it actually fails in that exact capacity (Lucas 2012, 3). Even more worrisome is the fact that, even though many general theories fail to explain the archaeological record, there are many archaeologists who insist that the archaeological knowledge that is being produced nowadays is not theoretical enough (see the example alluded to in chapter 4 concerning Yoffee’s criticism of recent work on ancient cities as under-theorized (Yoffee 2009, 281)). It was not, of course, the intention of this chapter to argue that past societies can only be understood through the narrative mode of description. In fact, even from a historical viewpoint, there is no reason to believe that narratives should hold a privileged position (Mandelbaum 1967, 416). With this being said, the gap that exists in the understanding of past societies – a gap which treats humans as actual humans and not like robots following orders or animals following instinct – cannot be filled with general theories, it can only be filled with a historical understandings of the past and in order to reach such understandings one must continue the self-reflexive exercise which questions what it actually is that archaeologists are doing when they address past societies. In order to pursue the argument defended in this chapter, it is necessary to understand what the archaeological record means to archaeologists and that is what we will be addressing in the next chapter.

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8 the a r c h a eo log i s t a s a d e t ect i v e

8.1. the archaeological record as evidence As we have seen so far there is no simple way to obtain an understanding of past human societies due to the indeterminacy of institutions of meaning. As the basis for our understanding of social objects, institutions of meaning cannot be grasped by breaking them down into individual and/or plural objects. We discussed this in chapter 2 with Latour’s actor-network theory and Hodder’s entanglement theory, and we also discussed this in chapter 4 with middle-range theory. To understand universities, armies, parties, banking institutions, we simply cannot break them into their constituent pieces. In the last chapter I made some argument in support of the historical understanding of the past but there is still much to be said about how it can be achieved in archaeology. To start off, the term I will be using in this chapter to define the source of archaeological information is ‘archaeological record’. The qualifier ‘archaeological’ means precisely the empirical record that is of interest in archaeology and is obtained by methods and practices which have been developed in archaeology, and some related subjects. To understand what I mean by ‘methods’ and ‘practices’, here is a brief enumeration of some of them: excavation, surveys, monitoring, isotope analysis, paleobotanical analysis, aDNA, geochemical analysis, trace residue analysis, archaeozoological analysis, epigraphical analysis, etc. There is much confusion as to what the ‘archaeological record’ actually is and whether it is something that actually exists. On this issue, Linda Patrik’s seminal paper Is there an archaeological record? (1985) is of great relevance. The

concept of an archaeological record has always been a contested term and has always been defined by the predominant ideological trend in vogue (Barrett 1988; Edgeworth 2003; Lucas 2012; McAnany/Hodder 2009; Patrik 1985; Tilley 1989b). In the mid 1980’s, when Patrik’s article was published, there were primarily two main conceptions of the archaeological record which were intricately tied to the specific ideologies that were developing at the time. The first way of thinking about the archaeological record, associated to processual archaeologists, describes the archaeological record as a fossil record, while the second way, associated to postprocessual archaeologists, describes the archaeological record along the lines of a text which codifies cultural rules (Patrik 1985, 28). As Patrik points out, processual archaeologists are not in agreement on how the archaeological record should be handled, for instance, some archaeologists recommend applying scales to it, others state that the record is a way of extracting, obtaining, or eliciting information, others state that the record is something towards which one tests hypotheses, while others recommend making observations on it (Patrik 1985, 29). On the other hand, postprocessual archaeologists are even more suspicious about what can actually be done with the archaeological record given that the record is something that exists in the present and as such, is something we interpret in our current cultural paradigms (Patrik 1985, 29). Given the opposition between how processual and postprocessual archaeologists interpret the archaeological record, Patrik has chosen two models to represent this opposition: the physical model and the textual model (1985, 35). The physical model, associated to processual archaeologists, is one that sees ar-

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chaeological evidence as contained in a fossil record, as a passive physical imprint of past activity, while the textual model, associated to postprocessual archaeologists, conceives the archaeological evidence as something akin to a historical record - as a text to be decoded, read, and analysed. Metaphysically, the physical model implies the static effects of causal processes that occurred in the past and are a direct evidence of human behavioural patterns, whereas the textual model is based on the idea that the record is also a physical record but of material signs or symbols which represent past concepts (1985, table 2.1. and table 2.2.). Towards the conclusion, Patrik attempts a synthesis of the two positions – by treating one model as the consequence of the other. Thus, in Patrik’s view, it can be said that the physical model is the temporal and causal consequence of the textual model (1985, 55). In the conclusion, Patrik answers the question posed in the title of her paper: “[f]or the question hints that archaeological evidence may not form any kind of record at all, even though it is presently conceived as a record (or as two kinds of record) by virtue of archaeologists' choice of concepts – really their choice of concepts through their choice of words” (1985, 56). The idea of ‘record’ and ‘evidence’ requires some parsing before we move on, and on this topic John Barrett wrote: “[i]n offering a reconsideration of our use of archaeological evidence I will argue that we should treat it not as a record of past events and processes but as evidence for particular social practices” (1988, 6). Like Patrik, Barrett dismisses the idea of an archaeological record but I wonder if that is really necessary. For instance, in a medical context, a human who is being examined by a doctor is addressed as ‘patient’. Does this mean that the person somehow became something different while inside a doctor’s office? Obviously not. Metaphysically, a human is still a human inside or outside the doctor’s office. This is because the term ‘patient’ is used as an identifier of people who are not part of the medical staff. Similarly, the term archaeological ‘record’ is not a record per se as Patrik correctly states, but it is a way in which we, as archaeologists, identify the source material for our research. Just like ‘patient’, a pot sherd does not magical-

ly change in the hands of an archaeologist but if the pot sherd is of relevance to archaeology we might indeed treat it and address it in a different way. A farmer who is tilling his lands might stumble upon a large number of pottery fragments originating from a Roman archaeological site a mere 30 cm below him, yet for him the fragments do not have the value they might have in the hands of a classical archaeologist. And thus, what might be just fragments of old pots for a farmer is the livelihood for an archaeologist that studies ancient Roman sites. In this sense, the archaeological record has to be understood as a catchall term that defines the source material of archaeological practice. Understanding what ‘evidence’ means is far more complex due to how archaeologists traditionally conceive the concept. Like the concept of ‘archaeological record’, the concept of ‘evidence’ derives its meaning when something is used as evidence. For example, a receipt is nothing more than a receipt but it becomes evidence if I need to use it to prove that I was somewhere at a certain time or that I acquired something. In this sense, evidence is inextricably linked to proof. In archaeology, what is archaeological evidence proof of? As Patrik states, the processual archaeologists will see archaeological evidence as proof of human activity, as caused by laws of human behaviour (1985, 38), whereas the postprocessual archaeologists will see evidence as proof of social structures encoded into material symbols (1985, 40). But what if the objective of archaeology is neither laws of behaviour nor codified symbolic systems? What if the objective is history? In this case, evidence becomes proof that something happened. One of the more popular views, among archaeologists from both processual and postprocessual traditions, is the view that archaeological evidence serves as proof of social practices. This view, while attractive at face value, hides a whole series of problems. For instance, Barrett writes: “Archaeological evidence should not be treated as a static outcome of past dynamics (a record). Instead it is the surviving fragments of those recursive media through which the practices of social discourse were

8 The archaeologist as a detective

constructed. Social practices are the object of our study: archaeology is the empirical examination of material evidence to discover how such practices were maintained within particular material conditions.” (Barrett 1988, 9). This perspective, which is also patent in Michael Schiffer’s way of thinking about the archaeological record (1976, 12–13), comes dangerously close to the ethnographer’s notion of an ‘ethnographic present’ (Binford 1981, 201). Why is that? Although Barrett is a great supporter of the historical view of past societies (1988, 14; 1994), he has automatically converted the archaeological evidence into what he believes to be social practices. What does social practice mean to Barrett? For him social practice equates to “relations of dominance between individuals and collectives” (Barrett 1988, 9). By thinking of society in terms of relations, one moves away from the observation of patterns, as studied through the causal mode of description, towards the understanding of how relationships are structured. These processes, which occur in specific times and places, can be subsumed under the heuristic device he calls fields of discourse (Barrett 1988, 11). At first, it might seem that fields of discourse and institutions of meaning are virtually synonymous but the fact is they are not. Unlike institutions of meaning, Barrett’s structure of relationships seems itself to be teleologically motivated. For instance, when Barrett states that “[social] practices were maintained within particular material conditions” (1988, 9) he seems to be arguing that social practices are intentionally maintained, that the social relationship is teleological, in itself. While it is true that social relationships are maintained, they are not maintained because social actors intentionally maintain them (except in specific cases). In order for these structures to maintain themselves Barrett needs to introduce ‘power’ and ‘authority’ into the equation (1988, 9–10). This is quite problematic in that, even without evidence, Barrett has already chosen a model in which past human populations automatically behave through power and authority. What this means is that if Barret’s ideas con-

cerning social practice were to be applied universally in archaeology, we would always need to address them in terms of power and authority. I will not enter the metaphysical debate of whether power and authority exist in all human societies or not but I will contest the fact that all human societies should be viewed through the lens of power and authority. For instance, as smoker, I do not consciously smoke in order to maintain an economic system in which people produce, distribute, and sell cigarettes. No one starts smoking with the intention of maintaining the economic and social structure that underlies the practice of cigarette smoking. It can be objected that even though it is not conscious, smoking does nonetheless maintain the institutional structures that produce and distribute cigarettes – but this information is not important because at no point can this power relation between myself as a user/consumer and the tobacco companies serve as a justification as to why I smoke. To be fair, there are indeed social actions that are intentionally and consciously aimed at maintaining the status quo, especially by the social members who have established positions of power and dominance (Miller/ Tilley 1984, 14; Pauketat/Emerson 1991; Shackel 2000; Walker/Schiffer 2006), but it is incorrect to assume that these types of action are a defining property of how societies develop. Once again, in order to articulate power, there already needs to be a set of institutions of meaning which provide the context in which power struggles are possible and intelligible. As had been commented extensively throughout the thesis, a human, in the capacity of a biological being, can and should be described under the causal mode of description but as a social being, a human requires the narrative mode because social action is one that is only understandable within the context of an institution of meaning. These institutions of meaning make social actions have a sense – a way in which they can be justified. This is not the same as saying that institutions of meaning cause specific types of behaviour or practices because this would be thinking in determinate and causal terms. Now, even when we are aware of the limitations of the

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causal mode of description, we sometimes lapse back into it – we go back to thinking that action must have a ‘force’ motivating it, and that identifying this ‘force’ allows us to explain any and every society. This is particularly true when we are face to face with a previously undiscovered social group. For instance, in his Outline of a Theory of Practice, Bourdieu states that the anthropologist who comes from the outside to observe a foreign society and is unaware of how the society operates, will create a map which serves as guide, a map which is composed of rules on how social members behave. According to this map, each member of the social group follows a "’role’, i.e. a predetermined set of discourses and actions appropriate to a particular ‘stagepart’” (1977, 2). It is true that given the lack of an understanding of what institutions are in play when faced with an unfamiliar social group, it is useful for the anthropologist to think in terms of “what can or cannot be done”. However, the moment the anthropologist is aware of why people act the way they do it stops making sense to think in terms of roles. As Anthony King points out, to continue thinking of the foreign society in terms of roles and the rules is to assume that the members of the foreign group also share the anthropologist’s idea of roles and rules and that they act according to them (2000, 419). If we approach past societies with ideas concerning power and authority already in mind, we are in way, establishing a priori rules to how members of the past societies must behave. In a way, this is lapsing back into thinking of social action in causal terms. To remove social action from the causal sphere, we must think of social action as something that makes sense within a game. Like in W. B. Gallie’s example from the last chapter, our understanding of social action requires us seeing things as if a cricket match were being played. At first, a player who is unfamiliar with the game will look at the game in terms of the rules one must follow, but once familiarity sets in, the player becomes what Bourdieu calls a ‘virtuoso’ (1977, 8) – someone who is in full command and can engage in several different games simultaneously. This takes us back to archaeological evidence – what we see in the record is evidence

of activity but not of social activity in the sense of regulated practice or rules. As Bourdieu states, social actors are virtuosos because they have mastered the ‘art of living’ (1977, 8). This would mean, for instance, that a social actor does not leave the house at 7:30 in the morning to go to work because there is an unspoken rule that forces him to, he goes to work because he needs to survive in the modern world; he needs to have food on the table and a roof over his head; he also desires, for his own entertainment, objects like TV’s and computer games; and he also likes to go to the cinema once in a while. All these activities are not rule-bound in the sense that the social actor must adapt to these activities in a strict and accurate manner, they are rule-bound in that he is unconsciously ‘aware’ of what he can do in society.

8.2. is the archaeological record a mirror of society ? A second problem that arises from thinking of humans as following a role is that it unavoidably leads to the conception of the ‘average man’ and to ‘everyday life’. It is true that the archaeological record reflects, to a large extent, activities which can be said to be customary – cooking, hunting, knapping, etc. – the problem lies in equating these activities with the practice of ‘everyday life’. Henri Lefebvre has argued that the idea of something that is done as a daily activity is a construction of the post-war consumerist culture established in the capitalist west (Lefebvre 2014 [1947]). Furthermore, the everyday life is much more complex than what it might initially seem since the everyday life requires conceiving the society in a way which separates the economic and organisational system from that of the consumer/user (Certeau 1988). People in the modern western world repeat their actions on a regular basis and justify these ‘traditions’ by saying that it is something that has always been done but rarely is it asked “how long has this tradition been practiced?” and in failing to ask this question, peo-


ple fail to realize that traditions are something that are invented to justify the practices of the everyday (Hobsbawn 2013 [1983]). Thinking in terms of ‘everyday life’ is thinking of past societies not as groups of historical actors who develop through time but as actors stuck in unchanging activities. ‘Everyday life’ makes past humans some sort of automatons who are stuck in certain states of behaviour – or in other words – stuck in recurring ethnographic ‘presents’. To move away from ‘everyday life’ the archaeologist needs to stop thinking of the archaeological record as evidence of social life. The archaeological record is evidence of things that have happened. To know what happened the archaeologist must follow the mind-set of that of a detective. So let us imagine a robbery – 10 million euros are stolen from a vault in a bank during the middle of the night. There are multiple suspects but given how easy the money was stolen, the detective suspects that there was someone working inside the bank who helped the thieves. The detective interviews everyone who is employed at the bank but obtains no information through this method. The detective then decides to go over the scene of the robbery itself. At the crime scene the detective finds what appears to be some food crumbs on the floor. He finds it strange that these food crumbs are inside the vault. Analysing these crumbs shows that it came from bread made at a bakery close by. The detective investigates if any of the bank employees is a regular customer at the bakery and realizes that there is, indeed, an employee who is a regular there. Following this clue, the detective starts interviewing people who know this employee and asks them if they have seen anything suspicious and from these interviews he discovers that the employee has held some suspicious meetings at his house the past months. At this point, the detective constructs a narrative: the employee and his associates have been planning a bank robbery for months and the plan is simple – the employee locks himself in the vault until the bank is closed. From the inside, the employee opens all the doors and given that he has security clearance, no alarm is triggered. However, the employee made one simple mistake: he ate a sandwich while he waited in the vault. To reach this con-

clusion the detective followed different ways of reasoning but his and our understanding comes from the perspective of how all the relevant events unfolded. As a member of modern society himself, the detective does not see the people that surround him as if they were puppets following social rules – if he did, there would have been no way to realize that it was an employee that helped rob the bank. He would have just assumed that the employee performed whatever his role was. The detective example touches upon the problem of seeing things in the light of everyday life activities: it would be impossible for an archaeologist to understand events like bank robberies or magical practices like the deposition of defixionum tabellae (see following chapter) because neither robberies nor defixionum tabellae are evidence of ‘social practices’ as we understand them in archaeology. Naturally, it can be objected that specific events like bank robberies leave traces which are too ephemeral, and consequently invisible to archaeologists, but this objection, much like “the archaeological record is too fragmentary” objection addressed in the last chapter, misses the point. Let us assume that robberies existed in the past even though they are virtually invisible in the archaeological record – obviously, it is not the fact that robberies actually happened in the past that is of direct interest to archaeology but the fact that, at some point in time, robberies could be intelligibly understood as robberies. For instance, for a society which does not recognize private property on an individual level it is impossible to state that a social actor ‘gave’ or’ ‘stole’ something to or from another social actor. It is only through the recognition of the institution of private property and by recognizing transactional value in certain types of object that the concepts of ‘giving’, ‘trading’, and ‘stealing’ make sense. For example, Brian Hayden’s research on feasting touches upon this subject when he states that feasting “(…) requires years of preparation and surplus accumulation, extending even into future, debt-ridden years due to the financing of feasts” (2001, 25). To the question of why people were feasting, Hayden turns to the purposes and the consequent benefits associated to feasting like mo-

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bilizing labour, investing surpluses, and generating profit (2001, 29–30). Furthermore, when addressing transegalitarian hunter/gatherers and horticulturalists he claims that feasting can be associated to the ‘promotion’ of economic, social, and political success (2001, 45). Hayden’s assessment of feasting practices is very insightful and elaborate but it is based on a series of economic caveats which require elucidation: for instance, the concepts of ‘labour’, ‘profit’, ‘surplus’, ‘currencies’, and ‘debt’ are primarily associated to market based economies which he simply imputes on the societies he analyses. In failing to discuss these economic concepts, Hayden is unconsciously following the position that past economies are nothing more than modern economies on a smaller scale (Sahlins 1972). This is not to say that Hayden is incorrect, it only means that the diverse reasons and purposes for why people feast in modern and pre-modern societies require an understanding of how these reasons and purposes relate to the economic institutions which make sense of them. Naturally, the aim of the archaeologist differs from that of the detective in that the archaeologist is not searching for a perpetrator – but rather an understanding. So when Hayden addresses the purposes of feasts, the archaeologist should not only look at feasts and their direct consequences but the historical and social context in which it would make sense to say that feasts have a purpose. If feasts can, for instance, “compensate for transgressions” as Hayden suggests (2001, 30) it must be assumed that the social actors in question recognize the transactional value between feasts and certain transgressions. The issue at hand, which I believe Hayden’s research on feasting demonstrates, is that the archaeological record is not in itself the social practice but evidence which can be interpreted as social practice, among other things. This might seem incredibly confusing to some because in archaeology, the notion of evidence has become virtually synonymous with social practices. For instance, Timothy Pauketat and his historical-processual approach succinctly summarizes practice into the idea “that all people enact, embody, or re-present traditions in ways that continuously alter those traditions” (2001, 79). Pauketat is not applying the

term ‘tradition’ in the same way as it was addressed above (e.g. Hobsbawn 2013 [1983]). For Pauketat, practices are not hermetically sealed, they are open to contingency and many participants, and in a larger sense, practices are a negotiative process. Practices are historical processes and their explanation resides on understanding them genealogically (2001, 80). Moreover, for Pauketat “[a] theory of practice, I submit, makes perfect history. The idea of practice focuses attention on the creative moments in time and space where change was actually generated. This generative process assumes no essentialist organizations, institutions, or belief-systems, but is located instead in microscale actions and representations” (2001, 87). The problem with Pauketat’s understanding of practice is that something like a bank robbery could never be recognized as a ‘bank robbery’ because bank robberies are not part of a ‘tradition of practices’ and thus, cannot be genealogically traced. In fact, like other processual and postprocessual archaeologists – Pauketat has aprioristically established a set of human activities not unlike those which are evoked as ‘everyday life’ activities – cooking, farming, hunting, or in one of Pauketat’s case-studies: pottery production (2001:82ff.). Let it be clear that there is nothing inherently wrong in assuming that the archaeological record is a record of past social practices – the problem lies in making an assumption which universalizes the process in which the archaeological record is formed – and consequently, is at odds with the historical understanding of the past. For instance, by focusing “attention on the creative moments in time and space where change was actually generated” (2001, 87), Pauketat is trying to hold on to the advantages of a general theory and of history at the same time – failing to realize that by embracing both a theory of practice and history he is transforming history into process based on universal tendencies. I realize that to many archaeologists, this middle-ground between a general theory and a history is very advantageous as it embraces the best of both worlds – but this is illusory – in that the theory already presupposes an interpretation of the archaeological record. In the case of Pauketat’s historical-processual approach, all an archaeologist


needs to do is gather archaeological data and fit them in a manner in which one can coherently evoke ‘negotiation’ and ‘creativity’, when there are cases in which negotiation and creativity are simply absent. The following observation could be made against my arguments: is it not to a large extent true that the archaeological record is in fact a reflection of what people in the past regularly did as active social members? To this question I would have to answer: I do not know. By assuming that yes, the archaeological record is indeed a reflection of past social practices - one has already chosen a pre-made interpretation of what the archaeological record should represent to archaeologists all around the world instead of letting archaeologists decide for themselves what the record stands for in their own specific cases.

8.3. the small and the intellectual The central problem concerning the archaeological record can be summarized to one word: shortcut. By positing the archaeological record on a universal social ontology one is automatically foregoing the first and most important job in archaeology which is interpreting the record itself. It is only after the record is interpreted that it is possible to say that the record is evidence of social action and/or practices. Prima facie, it might seem very practical to assume that archaeological traces are automatically social – however, this assumption perpetuates the platitude that ‘everything is social’ and eliminates the important task of asking ‘why’ the archaeological record is social in the first place. This aligns with the arguments made in chapter 4 – there are assumptions concerning how societies manifested in the past and there are assumptions which are necessary for archaeology to produce intelligible discourse, and as we saw, these latter assumptions involve being able to articulate different forms of objects into explanations about past societies. Like the empirical sciences which embrace individual/plural objects as evidence for or

against a hypothesis, the historian articulates these objects into histories – and it is here that the individual, plural, and social objects, as described in chapter 4, intermingle. This is important because it severs two inadequate views concerning how archaeology should operate: the first view is the one critiqued above which views society as having a set of inalienable characteristics, which are reflected in the archaeological record, and the role of archaeology in ‘fitting’ the individual and plural objects into that general view. This view is, in a gist, what is being criticized by Matthew Johnson and Gavin Lucas when they say that archaeological case-studies do not support nor find support from a general theory and vice-versa (Johnson 2006, 119; Lucas 2012, 3). The second view concerns the illusory perception that history exists because there are general processes producing the evidence which we a posteriori interpret as historical. This view was criticized in chapter 6 for perpetuating the positivist perception of human reality as constantly constrained by both internal (biological) and external (environmental) causes. Given that there is no direct connection between abstract views of reality and the physical evidence provided by the archaeological record, the concept of ‘evidence’ itself has become nigh-meaningless. Moreover, this disconnect between abstract theory and the archaeological record undermines the concept of case-study, where any information related to field work can qualify as a case-study (Czarniawska 2014, 21). It is with regards to case-studies that the proponents of general theories reveal one of the most recalcitrant truisms in archaeological writing – as long as a case-study is presented any theory can be considered valid. In contrast, the empirical sciences remain quite strict when it comes to what case-studies are and what type of information can be extracted from them. Thus, it is through archaeological science (e.g. archaeobotanics, isotope research, geoarchaeology, archaeometry) that case-studies have been used most effectively. Why is that? In the empirical sciences case-studies still follow, to a certain extent, the principle of falsifiability as described by Karl Popper (2002 [1935]). For Popper, the reliability of the empirical sciences could not lie in

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inductive methods because of the problem of induction in which statements about particulars, no matter how numerous, can never produce a universal statement that is truthful (2002 [1935], 5). Any conclusion drawn from particular instances of observation can never be universalized, for instance, recognizing that all swans that have been observed so far are white cannot lead to the conclusion that all swans are white because there could be swans of other colours which remain unobserved. Thus, inductive methods cannot lead to universal statements but they can provide probabilistic information with some degree of accuracy (Popper 2002 [1935], 6) which in archaeology translates in the analysis of samples and the application of quantitative methods. Unlike inductive methods which provide answers in terms of probability, based on the analysis of a certain quantity of data, deductive methods start with a hypothesis which is then tested in particular instances. For example, Ben Flyvbjerg relays the story of how Galileo came to reject Aristotle’s law of gravity by performing a single experiment (2006, 225). In archaeology, where experiments play an unimportant role, the case-study serves as a replacement. Historically, there are many similarities between some empirical disciplines and history, especially if one considers how these disciplines operated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. If one ignores the debate between positivists, who argued for methodological monism, and the non-positivists who argued for the separation of the Naturwissenschaften and Geisteswissenschaften, it is possible to recognize an affinity between subjects that are today considered very different, like art history and medicine (Ginzburg 1989; Ginzburg/Davin 1980). While there are, of course, considerable differences between these disciplines, we must also accept that there is a similar logic in how art historians attribute authorship to old paintings and how doctors diagnose. In this sense, both art historians and doctors are similar to the detective who follows clues. In archaeological science, the following of clues has been translated into the formal process of testing individual cases. Analogously, the archaeological historian can also follow a

similar method – but instead of applying deductive reasoning through the hypothetico-deductive approach, the archaeological historian constructs a narrative based on clues. This relationship between clues, deduction, and history has been explored quite thoroughly by Carlo Ginzburg (1989, 1993, Ginzburg/ Davin 1980). Ginzburg’s work is not unknown in archaeology and some have pointed the main strengths of his work like the importance accorded to the singular in historical explanation (Mímisson/Magnússon 2014), the importance of marginal data in semiotic readings (Lucas 2012, 26–27), and the interaction of individuals and the worlds in which they live (Preucel/Mrozowski 2010, 132). While all of these aspects of Ginzburg’s work are important I would like to shift the focus to Ginzburg’s contribution to the rise of intellectual history and to the understanding of the scientific disciplines. In general, Ginzburg’s historical work is associated to microhistory (Magnússon/ Szijártó 2013; Revel 1996; Szijártó 2002) – a historical approach and discourse which favours the microscopic mode of observation and description of human events (Levi 2001, 99). Prima facie, there seems to be similarities between Ginzburg’s microhistory and the micro-scale evoked by archaeologists which we commented on in chapter 6, but besides the use of the prefix ‘micro-‘ there really are no similarities. First of all, a cursory reading of Ginzburg’s examples of microhistory like The Cheese and the Worms (2013 [1980]) or his research in intellectual history, which can also be considered microhistorical, e.g. Wooden Eyes (2001), it is recognizable that there is little connection between microhistory and what archaeologists designate as the micro-scale of reality. In history, the rise of the microhistory was linked to the rise of narrative, intellectual history, and the rejection of serial history (Ginzburg 1993) whereas in archaeology the micro-scale is associated to ‘daily-life’ (Sheratt 1993, 128), ‘tradition’ (Kristiansen 2004, 95), and ‘practice’ (Pauketat 2001). Furthermore, as we saw in chapter 6, there are also archaeologists who link the micro-scale to a principle which presupposes that individual action is the basic component of social reality.


To be fair, there are also microhistorians who believe that the micro-scale, by focusing on human events, is capturing a reality which is more ‘real’ (Gregory 1999, 104), however, this is not actually how most microhistorians conceive reality. An easy mistake to make is to assume that microhistory focuses on the scale of microscopic human events because those events are somehow more important but this is not necessarily true – the small scale seems more important simply due to its familiarity, and familiarity does not necessarily translate into relevance (Ginzburg 2001, xiii). It is this familiarity that has led archaeologists and historians to associate the small-scale of the past to the idea that social life is oriented through roles: practices which generate ‘daily living’12 . Enquiries at the micro-scale should not be ignored but there is nothing inherently special in focusing on such a small scale – in fact, Ginzburg is convinced that the micro-scale is best used in combination with a macro-scale (1993, 26). In this regard, Siegfried Kracauer, who is more known for his work in film theory, was correct in recognizing that history does not necessarily need to be of a micro-scale given that this would preclude histories of nations for instance (2014 [1969], 104). This is also the view shared by W. B. Gallie who points out that Henri Pirenne’s Economic and Social History of Medieval Europe13 demonstrates the active role of social members without actually focusing on the choices and deeds of individual men (Gallie 1964, 87). Kracauer recognizes that there is nothing that makes the micro-scale inherently better – and that the difference in micro- and macro-scale concerns one of scope and generality. In his own words: “Not all of historical reality can be broken down into microscopic elements. The whole of history also comprises events and developments which occur above the micro dimension. For this reason histories at higher levels of generality are as much of the essence as studies of detail. But they suf-

12 Actually, 13 Gallie

fer from incompleteness; and if the historian does not want to fill the gaps in them "out of his own wit and conjecture,” he must explore the world of small events as well. Macro history cannot become history in the ideal sense unless it involves micro history. Now knowledge of detail may be used in different ways. Frequently enough, it serves as a sort of adornment. Macro historians, that is, avail themselves of micro research, their own or not, to corroborate or illustrate certain long-range views they have come to entertain – views attached to the distance from which they look at events.” (Kracauer 2014 [1969], 120). As a film theorist, Kracauer views history as it it were a film and thus, what matters is not whether the close-up or the panned out are more truthful representations of the past but what can be ascertained from different distances to the object of enquiry. If this is true, what advantages does microhistory provide? Microhistory started gaining recognition in the 1970’s which was, not by mere coincidence, around the same period in which a new type of cultural history came into play (Magnússon/Szijártó 2013, 5) also known as intellectual history (Clark 2004, chapter 6). Although the Annales School was entering a period of decline during this period, there was one element of the School which actually gained traction and this element was the historical study of mentalités (Stone 1979, 16). Simultaneously, in Italy we see the rise of microhistory. In a way, the historical study of mentalités in France and microhistory in Italy, are symptoms of a widespread rise of intellectual history. Although intellectual history did manifest in diverse ways, there were many scholars who argued that intellectual history required the microscopic scale of observation. According to Chartier (1982, 32), Darnton (1984, 3–4), and Ginzburg (1993), there was an inalienable link between the new intellectual history and the turn to the smaller scale. As Chartier states “[i]t is on this reduced scale,

there is an offshoot of microhistory dedicated exclusively to ‘daily life’ (Alltagsgeschichte). erroneously titles this book Economic and Social History of Western Europe.

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and probably only on this scale, that we can understand, without deterministic reduction, the relationships between systems of beliefs, of values and representations on one side, and social affiliations on another” (1982, 32). In intellectual history the causal view of society is repressed in favour of a way which was more human, a way which does not equalize all individuals (Ginzburg 1993, 21). For example, Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms (2013 [1980]) focuses on the trials of Menocchio, a miller in sixteenth century Italy who is literate and creates a theology of his own which leads him to confrontations with the Inquisition. Some scholars have claimed that The Cheese and the Worms is not a fair representation of popular culture in northern Italy during the sixteenth century (LaCapra 1985) and indeed, it is not because Ginzburg was not aiming towards representing popular culture, in general, but popular culture in specific. By focusing on a marginal miller who straddled the line that separated popular from elite culture, Ginzburg is revealing the limits of what could be done as a miller in sixteenth century Friuli, in northern Italy, and not what an average miller could do. Accusing The Cheese and the Worms of not being representative is not understanding the point and relevance of microhistory – because microhistory identifies culture in and of itself regardless of what is representative. Thinking in terms of representation is to think of microhistory as a scientific method of analysis – one which can capture smaller samples of a population – but this is a wholly incorrect way of reasoning. The advantage of microhistory is the fact that is not bound to quantification and it is on this issue that Ginzburg’s work is most often misunderstood: if quantification is eluded, then it does not matter if the object of enquiry in microhistory is a large sample of the population or even if it is an individual person. As we saw in chapter 6, what matters is not the fact that a person is an individual (1 person) but the fact that a person acts as if he or she were an individual – or in other words, as someone that can be socially differentiated from other people. It is in this sense that the hero of The Cheese and the Worms, Menocchio, is an individual: because he established himself as someone who rejects

the canonical interpretations of the scriptures – he is a ‘heretic’. It is in this sense that microhistory is a form of intellectual history because The Cheese and the Worms is a clear case-study of the intellectual climate of Northern Italy in the sixteenth century. Moreover, besides the contribution to intellectual history, Ginzburg’s work is also deeply associated to the notions of ‘proof ’ and ‘evidence’ (1989) which separated it from other strands of intellectual history. As Elton remarks, the rise of intellectual history in Europe was accompanied by a wave of relativist attitudes which is best represented by Hayden White’s work (1991, 33–34). At its worst, the claims of relativists was that history was more dependent on the historian than it was of the actual evidence used to support historical production. Naturally, no one is dismissing the point that historians are subject to biases and ideologies – but there must be, of course, some degree of empirical accuracy. Archaeology, especially prehistoric archaeology, would never be able to address the past in the same way that Ginzburg has in The Cheese and the Worms. However, it is not the scale and precision of Ginzburg that is of interest to us but the fact that he avoided the trap of the ‘average man’ and ‘everyday life’. Menocchio is the exact portrait of Bourdieu’s ‘virtuoso’, the person who is in perfect command of the ‘art of living’. This goes against some of ideas that have been defended in archaeology – namely that of perceiving the intellectual climate as a constraint to action (Hodder 1987). Once again, this view is still stuck in the causal mode of understanding reality. The appeal of constraints is that it works like an ant farm – it provides a sense of security and it provides the knowledge that the walls of farm are the limits of the known world. And knowing the limits of the world provides the illusion that one knows exactly how humans could have acted in the past. This is the problem of the history of mentalités of the Annales School. For instance, Braudel states: “Alongside such problems, the role of the individual and the event necessarily dwindles; it is a mere matter of perspective (…) By stating the narrowness of the limits of


action, is one denying the role of the individual in history? I think not. One may only have the choice between striking two or three blows: the question still arises: will one be able to strike them at all? To strike them effectively? To do so in the knowledge that only this range of choices is open to one? I would conclude with the paradox that the true man of action is he who can measure most nearly the constraints upon him, who chooses to remain within them and even to take advantage of the weight of the inevitable, exerting his own pressure in the same direction. All efforts against the prevailing tide of history – which is not always obvious – are doomed to failure.” (Braudel 1973, 1242–1244). Marxist historians would promptly reject such a view – because all one needs to do is look into the French or Russian revolutionary period to recognize that going against ‘history’ does not necessarily end in failure. As we saw in previous chapters, the answer to this constraint is not agency – but recognizing that society is not a dichotomy of constraint/freedom. Let us reflect on this for a while and think about, for instance, how people react during presidential election period. Imagine that the most powerful parties in a country put forward a series of candidates who they believe best represent the interests of their party. In the meanwhile, a candidate who developed outside party politics decides to run and this candidate gains immense popularity because instead of representing party interests, he represents the interests of the general population. The party and the media fight back against this candidate and a political war is started between those who support the party candidates and those who support the populist candidate. The populist candidate sees overwhelming support by younger generations on the internet – who deride and point out the flaws of the party candidates. How can we describe this anger for the party candidates in terms of mentalities? The problem with thinking about mentalities is the cognitive pressuposition that action is caused by a mentality. As a person who has friends and colleagues who are actively partic-

ipating in the debate described above, it would be wholly inaccurate to claim that any of them is acting in accordance to a general mentality. It would more correct to state that general mentalities are a consequence of how people act. Unlike the Annales history of mentalités, the intellectual history represented by microhistory is one that cannot be subsumed by general patterns of thought and this is excellently represented in Ginzburg’s work. Although Ginzburg did not take into consideration the philosophical concepts of institutions of meaning nor of intentionality, he seemed to have nevertheless reached the conclusion that to identify what is truly social about past societies was to focus on the intellectual climate of the past. Here, The Cheese and the Worms (Ginzburg 2013 [1980]), Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir addressed in chapter 7, and the detective investigating a bank robbery addressed above, all start making sense. In all three examples, what is of value to archaeology are not the actual micro-events but what they represent in terms of intelligibility. For instance, in the case of the detective above, there are two sets of clues – those which are of interest to the detective and those which are of interest to the archaeologist. For the detective, the clues are the traces left behind by the bank thief, for the archaeologist the clue is the bank robbery itself. What matters to the archaeologist is not who perpetrated the robbery but what a robbery represents in terms of understanding the social and historical context in which a bank robbery is intelligible. In order to understand what a bank robbery is the archaeologist needs to understand the past in terms of institutions of meaning – like the fact that private property must exist, or the assumption that banks must contain something of great transactional value, something that would, of course, demand the resources of a police force at its full capacity. Prima facie, this seems all rather obvious – nevertheless, if I were to state that the Neolithic in the Near East operated under the same institutions of meaning as those currently in effect in modern Europe, many archaeologists would object to my interpretation. So why is it that addressing a private property, transactional value, and police force seems anachronic to an archaeologist studying

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the Neolithic but not to someone observing modern reality? The only reason is because these notions cannot be applied to the Neolithic in the same way that they are applied today. Does that mean that people in the Neolithic did not recognize private property? If they did not then we cannot address inequality, surplus, and wealth in the Neolithic. Here lies the problem: if we want to address social inequality during the Neolithic in the Near East as issues concerning the unequal distribution of resources and wealth (e.g. Price and Bar-Yosef 2010) we must also recognize that at some point in the history of the societies populating the Near East, private property was recognized. In the same way that banks are a clue to the historical understanding of how modern economies developed, the archaeological record contains the clues as to how past societies developed. This is not a claim that there was no social inequality in the Neolithic, it is only the fact that for us to recognize inequality, we must also recognize how and why these societies became unequal because no society can be unequal unless they recognize some objects as things which can be private (instead of public) and that these private objects have transactional value. Furthermore, it is only when private property is recognized that robbery, for instance, can be recognized.

8.4. archaeology and the search for clues One of the problems of microhistory is that scholars focus too much on the text and not enough on how microhistorical research is conducted. While microhistories, as a finished product, are of great interest, it is also important to recognize that microhistory, as understood by Carlo Ginzburg, is based on a set of methodological assumptions which can elucidate its value to archaeology. Like modern historians, detectives do not witness the events they enquire upon – they have to base their conclusions on sources - in the case of the historian and clues - in the case of the detective. These sources/clues are not

historical in themselves but they are the objective elements which allow history to be understood. Ginzburg relays a story, based on fable, in which three brothers meet a man who has lost a camel. Even though the three brothers have never seen the camel, they can reconstruct its appearance to the last detail. Given their faithful reconstruction, the man who has lost the camel accuses them of having stolen it and they are taken before the emperor for judgement. For the brothers this is a moment of triumph because they explain to the emperor how through the observation of a myriad of clues, they managed to reconstruct a faithful narrative of the lost camel without having laid eyes on it (Ginzburg 1989, 93). This is an often ignored aspect of scientific research because the current paradigm of the empirical sciences assumes that there is an inherent quantitative aspect to how conclusions can be reached. This in turn translates into the continued reliance on the causal mode of description in both the empirical and the social sciences. As Ginzburg states, the approaches which follow clues differ, to a large extent, from those which are traditionally considered scientific in that what matters is not the general but the individual element (1989, 101). As we saw in chapter 4, archaeologists conceive their objects of enquiry in different ways – as individual, plural, social, and abstract – and what Ginzburg is referring to when he addresses ‘clues’ is, of course, individual objects. The individual object is the starting point of archaeology because it is only by acknowledging the individual object that inferences can be made concerning plural objects (quantitative and other scientific approaches) and social objects (historical understanding). It is in this sense that archaeology can be microhistorical in that archaeology can be a science that investigates clues and through those clues the archaeologist creates a narrative of what happened in the past. This is in direct opposition to the idea that the archaeological record is a reflection of society because by assuming that social processes created the archaeological record, archaeologists are suppressing the role of clues in the historical understanding of the past. Furthermore, by presupposing how societies generally operate, one is also diminishing


the importance of case-studies – which are a window to understanding the past. This seems to be one of the most common complaints against historical perspectives in archaeology – that by looking microscopically at reality, one is ignoring the forest in favour of individual trees (Kluckhohn 1940, 41). Kluckhohn’s criticism would be valid if forests, as a whole, could provide more insight into trees but the truth is individual trees provide more understanding of forests then the other way round. This is not to say that case-studies are not in some situations samples of a larger pattern of activity, what is being said is that case-studies can also be something else: a window into the past. Like The Cheese and the Worms, a casestudy provides us with an understanding that simply cannot be included into general patterns of behaviour. As we stated in the beginning of the chapter, institutions of meaning cannot be broken down into individual objects. This means that we should not approach the archaeological record with a top-down approach – or in other words, we should not presuppose how societies work and ‘verify’ if the archaeological record fits with our a priori conceptions of society. Instead, we should follow a bottom-up approach in which the archaeological record provides the clues for our historical understanding of the past. Naturally, this is not an excuse for an archaeology of historical trivialities – an archaeology that can only produce statements that have little or no relevance to other archaeolo-

gists. Archaeology remains a science which seeks to elucidate how and why people behaved the way they did in the past and as such, clues should demonstrate an objective historical understandings of how societies developed through time. To wit, clues leads us to institutions of meaning. For instance, in Hayden’s study on feasting addressed above – all the elements associated to feasting serve as clues to understanding how institutions of meaning develop because in order to feast, past social groups required recognizing the institutionalized value of the elements involved in feasting – because without this recognition, feasting is nothing more than eating. It is only through the communal acceptance of feasting as a display of value – that feasting can be understood as an event that promotes social and economic status. The task of the archaeologist is to recognize these clues in the archaeological record instead of just assuming they are inmmanent to all societies. To wit, one cannot assume that ‘competition’, ‘power’, ‘inequality’, ‘rules’, ‘freedom’, ‘exchange’, ‘labour’ and a myriad of other concepts are inherent to social life because all these concepts require institutions of meaning. Therefore, the archaeological record is the source that tells us how societies manifested in the past. This perspective on archaeology gives the archaeological record the importance which it is due - the record is the source of information of past societies and not the end result of speculation on how all societies operate in general.

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9 M ag ical a n d r e l ig i o u s r i t ua l s a n d t h e ir u n d er s ta n d in g

9.1. can something be ‘ magical ’? Chapters 9 and 10 concern specific cases in which the notion of historical understanding is of particular benefit. With this in mind, many of the ideas brought up in the previous chapters are essential. If the arguments that have been presented so far in the thesis are acceptable, we would also have to accept that there are specific topics in archaeology that have been addressed in an unsatisfactory manner. However, I do not intend, in these last chapters, to address problems and propose solutions in a systematic and exhaustive manner. Rather, the objective of these chapters is to present a general commentary on some topics and highlight some problems while simultaneously defending a historical perspective of these same topics. Thus, although these topics are very complex, I will focus only on very specific issues related to them and provide some very basic suggestions. Magic, along with religion, is one of these topics. This chapter is roughly divided into three parts, the first part concerns how rituals have been addressed by Joanna Brück, the second part concerns the naturalist view of religion of Pascal Boyer, and finally, the third part addresses ancient Greek magic through a historical understanding. Assuming that magic is something that is built upon institutions of meaning only to become a social institution in itself, it would derive that what we call ‘magic’ follows a narrative intelligibility that will be different from society to society. ‘Magic’ is the term we use to qualify those practices, whether in our society or in foreign ones, that are based on the same institutions of meanings. For instance, the

type of magic practiced by the ancient Greeks (Graf 1997) and the type magic practiced by the Azande (Pritchard 1976 [1937]) follow different rules and have different qualities, nevertheless, we can say that both these societies have magic but it is obvious that the way these societies institutionalized magic follow very different narrative developments. In 1991, H. S. Versnel wrote that “[m]agic does not exist, nor does religion. What do exist are our definitions of these concepts” (1991a, 177). These statements are correct or incorrect depending on the perspective one is adopting. Technically, Versnel is correct in that, from a scientific perspective, ‘magic’ is the term we use to qualify a set of discrete phenomena that correlates to the practices we qualify as being of ‘magical nature’. In this sense, magic is indeed non-existent as it refers to an arbitrary concept created by scientists to analyse an aspect of social reality. However, to avoid viewing magic in this relativist way, we must also recognize it in another sense – the one in which magic is a historically real aspect of social life. The acceptance of these two ways of conceiving magic is to accept the two elements necessary in understanding how and why it manifested in antiquity. To wit, to understand magic one can and should accept it first, as an arbitrary classification, and second as a something that becomes historically understood. As stated in the previous chapter, when unfamiliar with the social actors that one is researching, one can apply a mental map that sees those actors as following a role. Magic, as an arbitrary way of classifying practices, is part of that map. As part of a map, it makes sense to see magic as discrete human actions – in this sense, magic can manifest in a variety of ways like in

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Fig. 5 An example of a roman curse tablet.

haruspicy, the inspection of animal entrails, practiced by ancient Etrurians and Romans (Hekster/Rich 2006; Lenaghan 1969); “voodoo dolls”14 , an item associated to practices in the Ancient Greek and Roman World (Armitage 2015; Faraone 1991a), or curse tablets (Audollent 1904; Faraone 1991b; Jordan 1985; Versnel 1991b) also present in the Ancient Greek and Roman World (fig. 5). So let us imagine that a curse table is identified in the archaeological record – there is large likelihood to assume the tablet is associated to magical practices. This first step of identification is the process of correlation between what is identified in the record and what is assumed by the mental map. This first process is, however, the identification of ‘what’ qualifies as a magical item. From here, we can then ask ‘why’ that magical item exists. This forces us to go beyond the map because the map can only recognize objects, events, and social actors, as things which are discrete and determinate. To answer why-questions it is necessary to go beyond what is reduced by the map. While other questions employ a type of reasoning which requires perceiving the curse tablet as an individual object or as a plural object, as discussed in chapter 4, the moment we ask why the curse tablet is a magical item it is necessary to see the curse tablet, not as an object in the strict sense of the word, but as something that is part

of a triadic relation, and consequently, as a social object. A curse tablet does not derive its magical nature from some intrinsic property of the tablet itself but from how societies interacted with them. As explained in previous chapters, ‘curse tablets’ is a not a meaning that is imposed onto objects, it is a meaning that makes sense during certain historical contexts. For example, a party drink is not a regular drink on which we impose the meaning of ‘party’ – party drinks are simply the drinks that are commonly drunk at parties and to understand what a party drink is one must also know what parties are. If we think of magic as a party, we realize that Versnel’s statement that “magic does not exist” is not entirely accurate – it is not that magic does not exist, it is rather that magic is indeterminate and irreducible. In posing the question “why is a curse tablet a magical item?” the answer cannot be due to our decision to qualify the item as ‘magical’ – it is because it relates to social practices that can be qualified as ‘magical’. There is, however, an issue in thinking in these terms: it can be objected that the members of past societies we are dealing with might not have qualified these social practices as ‘magical’ because these practices might have been part of belief-system of a given lifestyle in which everything and anything could be qualified as ‘magical’.

14 As Armitage points out, voodoo dolls, as we understand them, is not prominent in either Haitian Voudou or the Voodoo culture that emerged in New Orleans in the 19th century (2015, 85).

9 Magical and religious rituals and their understanding

This is a valid concern but, ultimately, one that is misplaced. In studies concerning magic, religion, and rituals in general, it is often contended that the categories we use might not be appropriate to the study of ancient or foreign societies because the categories might not have a semantic equivalent in their conceptual scheme. This is a common objection as we saw in chapter 5, one that is recurrently used to reject Durkheim’s dichotomous separation of the sacred and the profane (1995 [1915]). Those who reject this dichotomy argue that not all societies articulate their social life through such compartmentalized notions such as ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’ (Bell 1992, 123; Brück 1999; Fowles 2013; Goody 1961; Insoll 2004, 24; Moore/Myerhoff 1977, 23). However, these criticisms, while valid, tend to then elaborate on other concepts that they believe might be of better use. For instance, Joanna Brück’s paper Ritual and Rationality: some problems of interpretation in European prehistory (1999) argues that in archaeological studies, the notion of ‘ritual’ has its origin in post-enlightenment rationalism and as such, it is based on the false distinction between the realm of the rational, secular, and instrumental, and the realm of the symbolic (Brück 1999, 318). Concomitantly, given that rituals are seen as non-instrumental, all that is necessary to identify rituals in the archaeological record is to infer whether the human action in question was performed with a pragmatic effect in mind – if yes, the action is secular, rational, and instrumental, if no, the action is symbolic, and thus, ritual in character (Brück 1999, 317). As Brück argues, this leads archaeologists to ignore the rituals that, like secular and rational actions, were performed with a pragmatic effect in mind, like curative cults and fertility rituals (Brück 1999, 320). The argument by Brück, albeit extremely well argued, leads to a homogenization of social action – one in which it is impossible to distinguish what is or is not ritual. However, Brück denies this claim: “Of course, the reader may object that by abandoning the dualism ritual-secular we risk homogenizing human practice and suppressing the variability that forms the

basis for archaeological interpretation. On the contrary, I would argue that my approach does not presuppose a lack of difference. Rather, it makes the nature of these differences the focus of archaeological enquiry instead of an a priori assumption. For example, it is perfectly possible that middle Bronze Age people considered the kinds of depositional activities discussed later in this article as special or different in some way; If they did, however, it is inherently unlikely that they distinguished these activities from other types of practice using the criteria (i.e. 'oddness', 'impracticality' and 'irrationality') applied by archaeologists.” (Brück 1999, 327). Brück’s example is based on the activities practiced by middle Bronze Age societies in Europe, namely, the deposition of objects in good condition and animal parts in ditches, pits, and other features, a particular type of deposit that has been qualified as ‘odd’, ‘special’, or ‘structured’ (Garrow 2012, Hill 1995, Richards/Thomas 1984). For Brück, the people who performed these actions were not irrational in a strict sense of the word, they are just following a different form of rationality (Brück 1999, 335; Winch 1964). To support her argument, Brück relies on a threefold scheme of human-environment relations devised by Gísli Pálsson (1996). In this scheme, Pálsson sees human-environment relationships as either orientalist, paternalist, or communalist. The orientalist type of relation is based on the mastery of humans over the environment, where non-humans are ‘colonialized’ by humans; the paternalist type of relationship is not exploitative but rather protective of the environment and we can see examples of this type of relation in societies which attribute human rights to animals; finally, the communalist type of relationship is one that recognizes the unbroken relationship between humans and nature, a reciprocal rapport in which humans and non-humans represent an ontological symmetry, much like in Latour’s actor-network-theory (Lucas 2012, 162). Brück argues that it would not be a stretch to conceive the practices of middle Bronze Age societies as communalist. In Brück’s view, the distinction between instrumental activities and symbolic activities – im-

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plied in the sacred-profane distinction, has no place in communalist societies. Brück’s excellent study of ritual and Bronze Age practices puts forward very compelling arguments but it does not actually explain what ritual is, it only rejects previous attempts in archaeology to define ritual. Naturally, I am not advocating the use of the concept of ritual in contexts in which it is clearly inadequate – but following Brück’s ideas would leave us in a position in which it would be impossible to discuss ritual, and analogously, magic and religion, in an archaeological context. Why is that? Well, for Brück, actions that are individualizable and determinate, e.g. baking a cake, saying a prayer, walking a dog, cannot themselves be ritual – it is dependent of a holistic belief-system. Let us now think in terms of a curse tablet: it can be said that curse tablets originating from Ancient Greek contexts are ritual and magical. This seems undeniable yet, as we shall see further down, a curse tablet is magical because that is simply what curse tablets are. Thus, when we say that a curse tablet is magical, we are not saying that 1) the curse tablet has magical properties, 2) the actions associated to curse tablets are magical, and 3) the curse tablet is magical because people in the past believed it was magical. With this in mind, Brück is entirely justified in criticizing the scholars who have reduced ritual and non-ritual actions to determinate actions but similarly, she has failed to identify the context in which it would make sense to state that something is ritual. So for Brück, ancient societies can only be perceived through two contexts: the context of determinate actions, like baking a cake or saying a prayer, and the context of holistic belief-systems. With regards to belief-systems, Brück has this to say: “[b]y acting practically upon the world in dayto-day life, people play out the beliefs and values that constitute their particular way of understanding the world. In other words, cosmologies are not abstract ideological/symbolic systems but enable people to understand

the world and to get on in it by providing a logic for action and an explanation of the universe” (1999, 326). I find this rather unsatisfactory because if we were to ask why middle Bronze Age societies practiced agriculture the way they did, it would be dismissive to claim that it is because of their belief-system. Concomitantly, if we ask why they deposited objects and animal bones in deposits and ditches, one would expect the answer to this question different from the one above. To this, Brück states: “[i]t is not stretching the evidence too far to suggest that some of the 'odd' deposits discussed above may have acted as a means of maintaining the productivity of land and livestock through the giving of offerings, perhaps to particular spirits, ancestors or deities” (1999, 336). But how is this not a ritual, an activity that, due to its aim, is clearly distinct from other activities? This is a problem that could be solved if Brück accepted Barret’s notion of ‘field of discourse’15 (Barrett 1988). Concerning rituals, Barrett argues that what is sacred does not permeate all aspects of life as rituals are part of a distinct ‘field of discourse’ which are bracketed off from other distinct sphere of life (Barrett 1991). Prima facie, this solves the solution to Brück‘s problem: through fields of discourse, ritual need not be reduced to determinate action nor does it have to be seen in a holistic context which permeates all life. However, Brück dismisses Barrett’s ‘fields of discourse’: “Barrett is right, however, to point out that different forms of knowledge exist within anyone society and that these can be used as a source of comment and critique on other areas of social practice. However, to differentiate these into two broad forms - ritual and non-ritual knowledge - is not only to simplify human action but also to presuppose categorizations of practice that should remain a focus of discussion. 'Fields of discourse' are defined and bracketed in different ways according to cultural context and

15 Although I have rejected the notion of ‘fields of discourse’ in the previous chapter in favour of institutions of meaning, Brück would not have been able to know about institutions of meaning in 1999.


anyone of these (not only that which archaeologists would label ritual) can form a platform from which to assess and question other areas of social practice. This is because culture is not a uniform entity; forms of knowledge vary from context to context within anyone society and cannot simply be polarized into ritual and non-ritual categories.” (Brück 1999, 328). Once again, Brück is correct in that ritual and non-ritual cannot be polarized. So let us look at this issue from the perspective of institutions of meaning. Unlike fields of discourse, institutions of meaning is not focused on discourse per se but on intelligibility. To perform a ritual is to know that you are performing a ritual and not something else. For instance, the act of giving something requires the donor and the donee to know that the gift belongs first to one person and after the act of giving, the gift belongs to another. Without recognizing that gifts belong to someone, gift-giving cannot occur. This is, of course, more than a mechanical process of handing something to someone else – for instance, when a mother hands her child to the father, it is not an act of gift giving because the baby does not belong to either the mother or the father, stricto sensu. Therefore, for a ritual to be a ritual, the process involved must supervene on meanings that are different from those of other activities. For Brück, the ritual depends on a belief-system in which ritual action would make sense. But what about other activities, like exchange of items for instance? It could be objected that yes, exchange might have depended on the same belief-system that regulates ritual practices, however, exchange in the Bronze Age in Europe occurs between peoples from disparate places (Chapman 2008; Clark 2009; Eogan 1990; Rowlands/Ling 2013) like Scandinavia and the Iberian Peninsula. This begs the question, did Bronze Age communities from Scandinavia and Iberian Peninsula share the same belief-system? It is unlikely, but if we subscribe to Brück’s position the answer would have to be ‘yes’. Why? If a Bronze Age community of the Iberian Peninsula and a Bronze Age community of Scandinavia organize their life through different belief-systems, systems which dictate how exchange must proceed,

then it would be impossible for these communities to interact with one another because ‘exchange’ would mean different things to each of these communties. This was addressed in chapter 5: if we assume that all action depends on a holistic system (of beliefs, language, structure, etc.) then a British scientist would not be able to go to a restaurant in Japan because her notion of ‘restaurant’ would be unintelligible to the Japanese and vice-versa. Naturally, we are aware that westerners can and usually go to restaurants in Japan because restaurants are based on institutions of meaning that are common to both Japanese and Westerners. Similarly, it must have been possible for members of Bronze-Age societies to recognize an action, events, and objects, specific to ritual practices, regardless of their belief-system, in the same way that we recognize a drink as a party drink in the context of a party and magical item like a voodoo doll as magical in the context of a magical ritual.

9.2. the ‘accidental’ religion Joanna Brück addresses many issues in her paper but we are still left without knowing why people in the middle Bronze Age practiced deposited objects and animal bones within pits, ditches, and other features. As we saw above, Brück’s sees that it is not improbable that the depositions were “a means of maintaining the productivity of land and livestock through the giving of offerings, perhaps to particular spirits, ancestors or deities” (1999, 336). This explanation is partially posited on the assumption that the middle Bronze Age communities in question were communalists (pace Pálsson 1996, 72ff.). This, however, is not an answer to a why-question. At face value, stating that rituals were practiced to maintain productivity of land and livestock is a teleological explanation and one we can fully understand. What we do not yet understand is why people in middle Bronze Age societies would want to maintain productivity by medium of depositional rituals. Why did people in the Bronze Age maintain agricultural and pastoral

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productivity by means of ritual and not through other techniques, like crop rotation or by giving the livestock better feed? Facetiousness aside, I believe this question to be important because it points out something that has been ignored by Brück: if we assume that Bronze Age societies were not yet aware of techniques like crop rotation, we must also assume that at some point in time, before the Bronze Age, societies were not aware of depositional rituals. As discussed elsewhere, it is incredibly problematic to assume that belief-systems are what motivates ritual practices (Arponen/ Ribeiro 2014). Why is that? If we accept that societies of the middle Bronze Age in Europe practiced rituals to maintain agricultural and pastoral productivity because of their communalist belief-system, it would derive that other societies which follow communalist belief-systems must have also developed the same rituals. Pálsson states hunter-gatherer societies are paradigmatic examples of communalism (1996, 74) but it would not have been possible for hunter-gatherer societies to have practiced depositional rituals to maintain agricultural and pastoral productivity because hunter-gatherer societies, as their name imply, do not practice agriculture nor pastoralism. This means that the same belief-system can yield rituals that are completely different and have completely different objectives depending on which society we are dealing with. Is it possible for a group of people, living in the USA in the twenty-first century, to follow a communalist belief-system? Technically, it is indeed possible for a group of people living in modern times to believe that there is no separation between nature and culture, yet it is also possible for these same people to not only have no ‘ritual’ practices whatsoever and engage in the same lifestyle as the rest of the American population. When discussing magic, rituals, and spirituality in general, recognizing that these might be associated to beliefs is, of course, very important but the belief itself is not the answer as to why a group of people practice a ritual. Christians do not wake up early on Sunday mornings to go to Church because they believe in the Christian God nor do scientists wake up early every weekday and go to the lab

because they believe in science. To understand why people act in this manner one needs to understand these action from a historical point-of-view. Christianity is a religion that has a two-thousand-year history and the practices associated to it have changed considerably throughout this history. So when Brück explains why middle Bronze Age societies practiced depositional rituals, her explanation results in a dead end – depositional rituals are performed to maintain agricultural and pastoral productivity and this productivity is associated to their communalist belief-system – and where does this belief-system come from? Questions such as these are rarely asked in archaeology – it is simply assumed that belief and economic systems are immanent to all societies and that there is no point in questioning where, when, and why did past societies adopt beliefs and economic concepts. Religion, magic, and spirituality in general, as social objects, require a historical understanding because as social objects, they cannot be explained by appealing to the causal mode of description. For instance, the problem with Brück’s explanation of ritual in the Bronze Age is that she assumes that providing a belief-system is enough to account for why societies in the Bronze Age engaged in ritual practices. Prima facie, Brück’s explanation might not seem like a causal explanation but it is, as she has equated beliefs with the cause and rituals with the effect. As an explanation this is insufficient not only because there is no explanation as to why middle Bronze Age societies of Europe follow a communalist belief-system and also because people do not always act upon beliefs. Another issue surrounding the causal mode is that it unavoidably leads to issues concerning determinism and contingency, issues that are overcome by following a historical understanding of the past. In the narrative mode, a description of a society that develops a religion does not imply that all societies have the propensity to develop religion (determinism) nor that societies develop religion completely by accident (contingency). In the narrative mode, all that matters is why and how a specific society developed religion. Underlying what Brück is saying, is the problem of whether rituals can happen accidental-


ly or whether there is a general cause which justifies why rituals occur. In chapter 6 it was stated that universal theories like structural anthropology (Levi-Strauss) are inadequate to explain social phenomena because they are based on a general feature or mechanism of humanity. This type of theories have also been applied to magic (Greenwood 2000, 2005, 2009; Mauss 2007 [1950]) and religion (Boyer 1994, 2001). Of interest to us is Pascal Boyer’s work as he assumes that religion can be understood through an analysis of the human mind – and just like Levi-Strauss’s structural anthropology which is posited on the mind, Boyer runs into some of the same problems found in structural anthropology and Joanna Brück’s account of ritual practice. For instance, Boyer states: “In particular, it is clear that our minds are not really prepared to acquire just about any kind of notion that is "in the culture". We do not just "learn what is in the environment," as people sometimes say. That is not the case, because no mind in the world— this is true all the way from the cockroach to the giraffe to you or me—could ever learn anything without having very sophisticated mental equipment that is prepared to identify relevant information in the environment and to treat that information in a special way. Our minds are prepared because natural selection gave us particular mental predispositions. Being prepared for some concepts, human minds are also prepared for certain variations of these concepts. As I will show, this means, among other things, that all human beings can easily acquire a certain range of religious notions and communicate them to others.” (Boyer 2001, 3). If we were to follow Boyer’s ideas, it would be impossible to separate magic from religion – magic would have to be considered nothing more than an offshoot of religion. Why is that? According to Boyer, the human mind has the capacity to acquire a certain range of religious notions (2001, 3), not only that, these notions are easily transmissible (1994, 5–6). Let us assume that Boyer is entirely correct in stating that religious ideas are easily acquired

by the human mind and that they are easily transmissible – we are faced with two questions: how does one acquire a religious idea and how does one transmit religious ideas without having who to transmit them to? If, as Boyer argues, an understanding of religiousness is to be found in the human mind then it should be possible to study religiousness not only in fully formed societies but also in individuals given that minds (of individuals) are receptive to religious ideas. In this respect, Boyer can be faced with this question: is it possible to understand religion by studying an individual that has been stranded on an island for his or her whole life? The mind we all share, including me, you, and Boyer, is the same human mind, so religiousness can be studied regardless of who owns the mind. To this, Boyer argues that even though the mind has the capacity to easily acquire religious ideas, not all societal groups develop these ideas. As he argues, humans have the capacity to catch colds even when we are not exposed to the cold virus, similarly, we have the capacity to acquire religious ideas even when we are not exposed to religion (Boyer 2001, 4). So for Boyer, religion is not a universal feature of humans – what is universal is the capacity to acquire religious ideas. This leads to a rather problematic issue: where did the first religious idea come from? According to Boyer, humans have the capacity to acquire religious ideas, but not to create them – which logically means that religion should never have existed. This begs the question: is it possible that our minds are conditioned to acquire other type of ideas which have never manifested in history? Technically yes. The human body is prone to catch the cold virus, but it is also certainly prone to catch other viruses that do not exist. So following Boyer’s logic – humans have the capacity to acquire religious ideas, even if religion had never existed in the entire history of the human race. Besides this apparent contradiction, what remains to be explained in Boyer’s conception of how religiousness occurs is why some societies develop religion and others do not. Let us think of religion as an easily transmitted disease (Sperber 1996, 77ff.) - in this scenario one would assume that no matter what happens, one will become religious if one is ex-

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posed to religious ideas correct? Just like an easily transmitted disease, if a person is exposed there is a large chance that that person will become contaminated. This analogy is a good one up until we recognize that social concepts are not the same as diseases in that one can choose not to become religious. For instance, the Pirahã in Brazil, a society that we would today call ‘secular’, have been ‘exposed’ to 200 years of missionaries unsuccessfully trying to convert them to Christianity: “The difficulty at the core of my reason for being among the Pirahãs was that the message that I had staked my life and career on did not fit the Pirahãs' culture. At the very least, one lesson to draw here was that my confidence in the universal appeal of the spiritual message I was bringing was illfounded. The Pirahãs were not in the market for a new worldview. And they could defend their own just fine. Had I taken the time to read about the Pirahãs before visiting them the first time, I would have learned that missionaries had been trying to convert them for over two hundred years. From the first record of contact with the Pirahãs and the Muras, a closely related people, in the eighteenth century, they had developed a reputation for "recalcitrance"-no Pirahãs are known to have "converted" at any period of their history.” (Everett 2009, 269). Everett’s account of the Pirahã recalcitrance to convert throws a wrench into Boyer’s ideas as he points to something very interesting: religion does not fit in Pirahã culture. What this means is that it is technically possible for a society to develop in a way in which religion becomes anathema, and this is exactly what has happened to the Pirahã. So for instance, in the modern western world, many people have been gradually moving away from religion in favour of secularism and atheism and like the Pirahã, religion simply does not fit into the culture of these social groups – as the beliefs associated to modern religions goes against their current world-view. Nevertheless, Boyer insists that the mind of atheists, the mind of the Pirahã, and the mind of every human that has ever lived in society today, will be responsive to religious ideas.

Obviously, the responsiveness of religious ideas depends entirely on the history, background, education of the people in question. By placing religiousness as a mental phenomenon, Boyer has followed the naturalist path of thinking that religion can be understood through causal terms and thinking in these terms is what leads him to the contradiction of accepting religiousness as a universal capacity of the human mind yet at the same time having to admit that not all human minds develop religion (1994, 5–6; 2001, 4). The question that Boyer is trying to answer is why do societies who are worlds apart have religious concepts that are, at face value, identical (2001, 48)? For Boyer the answer has to be causal because only by identifying the common cause (human mind) can one understand religion as a global phenomenon. In itself, this is not problematic because maybe Boyer is correct in assuming that there is a common cause for why religion is such widespread phenomenon – the problem is that identifying this common cause does not provide an explanation of religious phenomena. Let us imagine that we accept Boyer’s premise that religious notions are easily acquired by the human mind. With this in mind, if I ask “do the Hazda hunter-gatherers of Tanzania have a religion?” is the question answerable by appealing to the human mind? The only way we can answer yes to this question is to accept religion as a universal phenomenon – which it is not. It is entirely possible for the Hazda to have developed as a society without religion and to understand why, one must know the history of the Hazda. I understand that Boyer’s insistence on universality is to counteract the idea that religion can just ‘accidentally’ happen to a society. As Boyer states (…) we should abandon the search for a historical origin of religion in the sense of a point in time (however long ago) when people created religion where there was none. All scenarios that describe people sitting around and inventing religion are dubious” (2001, 33). When seen in this perspective, a historical account of how religion came into existence is untenable. But this is not how history works: history is not devoted to the task of identifying origin points, because if it was,


then history books would be much smaller and compact than they generally are. Thus, to understand how religious ideas emerge one must think of the context in which it is possible for it to emerge. The first thing we must realize is that when it comes to religion, societies are not blank slates on which ‘culture’ inscribes a set of rules and practices. This means that societies do not have a phase in which they start of as secular and are exposed to religious ideas (Asad 2003). This leads to the the question: so before humans had religious ideas or secular ideas, what were they? Well, they were humans much like you and me – the difference is that for people who are neither religious nor secular, the conception of what is ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ is unintelligible. For religion and secularism to exist, there needs to be a social context in which the concept of religion and secularism make sense, to wit, there already needs to be institutions of meaning which allow religion and secularism to develop. Thus, a history of how religious ideas is not a history of something that was created out of thin air. Christian religion for instance, is one that sees influence that can be traced back thousands of years (MacCulloch 2009) before Christianity was recognized as a religion. Moreover, we know in hindsight that the Greek, Roman, Sumerian influences in Christianity were crucial to its development. However, the author(s) of the Epic of Gilgamesh, who wrote about Uta-Napishtim, the precursor or the Biblical Noah, did not know he was creating what would become an influence to Christianity. As Danto argues, we can know how romans behaved in the last years of the Roman Republic but the actual romans could not have seen their own behaviour in the same way because they were not witnessing it in hindsight, as someone who already knows that these were the last years of the Republic (1985, 346). Similarly, how is it possible for someone to know that something is religious before the existence of the institution which qualify things as religious? Boyer states that people have religious notions because they have acquired them from other people (2001, 40), however, for Boyer – these notions can be religious even before religion exists. So logically, according to Boyer – one can know what is religious before religion has appeared. Let us see why this is problem-

atic by following an example: imagine that a person who has never been raised as either religious or secular witnesses a tree being cut down and this tree releases a sap which looks remarkably like human blood. From this experience, the person comes to believe that this type of tree is similar to human beings as it also has blood and can bleed like humans. At this point, can it be said that said person believes in a religion? A religion contains much more than just a simple belief. At times, when we cannot come up with a scientific explanation for a certain phenomenon, e.g. certain lights in the sky or people disappearing in thin air, we might temporarily believe that there is something supernatural going on, something that cannot be explained by science. However, for us to think of something as supernatural, we must also believe in something that is natural – or in other words – that which is explainable by science. The question we must ask then is: does the person who believes a tree is a human being believe in something religious or supernatural? To our perceptions yes, but the person in question does not recognize his or her belief as religious or supernatural because he or she does not know what it means for something to be religious or supernatural. Ultimately, if religion is described through the causal mode, it must also be seen as determined, or constrained by external factors, or as something absolutely contingent – something that happened by accident. It is easy to fall into the mistake of assuming that a historical understanding of past societies, by focusing on what is unique and particular, is promoting a contingent view of reality but this could not be further from the truth. History, as it has been described in this thesis, does not direct its attention to the metaphysical question of whether objects, people, and events happen due to causal inevitability or due to mere happenstance. This means that a historical narrative which describes how a religion emerged is not a description of a single event in which a religion is suddenly ‘invented’, in fact, it does the exact opposite – it shows that religion does not just emerge suddenly out of nowhere – it shows that there is a context in which it would have made sense for religion to emerge, or in other words, a narrative intelligibility.

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9.3. curses and appeals to justice Following the same logic as that described in the previous sub-chapter, magic cannot be seen as a contingent phenomenon because there is a historical reason for why magic, as a social object, exists. To understand magic, one must understand its relation to religion. The difference between religion and magic has been studied extensively by cultural anthropologists and it is in the work of Edward Tylor (1871a) and James Frazer (1900) that we see some of the most interesting analyses of magic. For instance, Frazer and Tylor base their conception of magic on the idea that it is sympathetic - which is described in the following way: “By a vast mass of evidence from savage, barbaric, and civilized life, magic arts which have resulted from thus mistaking an ideal for a real connexion, may be clearly traced from the lower culture which they are of, to the higher culture which they are in. Such are the practices whereby a distant person is to be affected by acting on something closely associated with him his property, clothes he has worn, and above all cuttings of his hair and nails.” (Tylor 1871a, 116). “If we analyse the principles of thought on which magic is based, they will probably be found to resolve themselves into two: first, that like produces like, or that an effect resembles its cause; and, second, that things which have once been in contact with each other continue to act on each other at a distance after the physical contact has been severed. The former principle may be called the Law of Similarity, the latter the Law of Contact or Contagion.” (Frazer 1900, 52). In short, for both Tylor and Frazer, magic is based on the idea that a part represents the whole and what affects the part can affect the whole – and that is why magic is seen as ‘sympathetic’. However, as Marcel Mauss points out, these properties are also present, to a large extent, in religious practices (2007 [1950], 16). Thus, this description of magic did not survive

for long as it was criticized quite thoroughly in the 1930’s. After this period, several anthropologists proposed looking at more specific properties of magical acts, namely the propensity of magical practices towards specific and concrete goals, its instrumental and manipulative character, and the individualist and consequently anti-social nature of magical goals (Versnel 1991a, 178–179), and use these as defining factors in understanding magic. Once again, these characteristic have also failed to establish themselves perennially as they can also be found in religious practices. Further attempts have been made to separate magical practices from religious practices but, unlike previous attempts which established fixed and essential properties to both magic and religion, these more recent attempts established magic and religion as aspects of a continuum (Goode 1949; Moore/Myerhoff 1977). The idea of a continuum, which has widespread use in the social sciences, sees religion and magic not as directly opposite but as ideal points within a spectrum and what we identify as systems of magic or religion will not be located on these ideal points but somewhere in between, with some systems leaning more towards the ideal of magic and other systems leaning more towards the ideal of religion (Goode 1949, 176). While this might be a sensible approach, it does have some limitations, as we shall see further below. The difficulty in defining magic as a universal category lies in the lack of the institutional factor. In this sense, Frazer might actually have been the one that was closest to identifying what magic is by associating it to the law of similarity and to the law of contact. When we say that magic requires an institutional factor, we are saying that there is an objective meaning to magic, without which, one could not distinguish a magical act from a religious one. Some would argue that discussing magic in terms of meaning would be following the approach in which magic belongs to the domain of the symbolic as opposed to the instrumental. This would be incorrect and let me explain why: If I write down on a paper that I hate a certain person and I hope that person dies, I do not expect that by writing it down something will happen to that person. In Ancient Greece


however, if I had written down the name of the person on a sheet of lead and submerged it in a body of water (Fox 1912) or buried it in the ground (Versnel 1991b), I would have done this because I expect that this would have an effect on the person in question. Let us think of this teleologically: there is no conceivable reason to write down the fact that I hate a person and I expect the person dies which is why people do not usually do this, however, in Ancient Greece there was the expectation that something would happen to the person if I had written his or her name on a sheet of lead. Prima facie, this makes it seem like that the magical act of inscribing a name on a sheet of lead is an instrumental act – and, in fact, it truly is. However, the fact that it is instrumental tells us nothing. For instance, I could stab the person I hate to obtain immediate results – an act that could be interpreted as instrumental – but at no point can it be said that stabbing a person is a magical act. Thus, the person that believed that by inscribing a sheet of lead with a person’s name would affect the person in question was subscribing to an institution of meaning in which a name represents the person. So in a way, Frazer is indeed correct in claiming that the law of similarity is a part of magic. Once again, it is also not sufficient to say that the law of similarity is what gives magic its key characteristic. Albeit a very important one, we must understand why it is a key characteristic. For this, we must look much closer to the practice of inscribing sheets of lead in Ancient Greece and Rome to understand what really is necessary for a magical act to occur. The practice of inscribing names on lead sheets is one that is associated to Ancient Greek and Roman magic. It has been studied quite thoroughly since the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century (Audollent 1904, Wünsch 1897). These sheets of lead are traditionally called ‘curse tablets’ in English speaking countries and called ‘defixionum tabellae’ or ‘κατάδεσμος’ in other countries. Both defixionum tabellae and κατάδεσμος translate roughly into ‘binding spell’ (Faraone 1991b, footnote 3). Traditionally, curse tablets take the form of lead sheets although, on occasion, they can have a different medium, like a ‘doll’ or on sheets of a different type of metal (Moretti 2015, 103). D. R. Jordan defines curse tablets as

“inscribed pieces of lead, usually in the form of small, thin sheets, intended to influence, by supernatural means, the actions or welfare of persons or animals against their will” (1985, 151). The way in which curses present themselves across Ancient Greece and Rome can be quite varied but there are three main types of curse we are interested in: the direct formula in which the author of the curse, the defigens, hopes to manipulate the victim in a direct and automatic fashion; there is also the curse which follows a prayer formula, in which the defigens prays to an underworld deity in the hope that the deity accomplishes the curse; and finally, the similia-similibus formula in which the curse is a request that the victim become similar to something to which he or she is completely dissimilar (Faraone 1991b, 10). Let us look at two curses, one that follows a direct formula and one that follows a prayer formula: Quintula cum Fortunali sit semel et num/ quam “Quintula and Fortunali can never meet!”

Fig. 6 Curse tablet from Sagunto, Spain

In fig. 6 we see a curse tablet, found in Sagunto, Spain, and studied by Corell (1994) and myself (Ribeiro 2006). It contains a short but expressive text, which does not make any appeal to any deity, and which derives its manipulative power from the curse tablet itself. In fig. 7 and 8 we have an example of a prayer formula, found in Alcaçer do Sal (Portugal), and studied by Encarnação (2001, 2002a, 2002b), Encarnação/Faria (2002), Guerra (2003), Marco Simón (2004), and myself (Ribeiro 2006). Domine Megare / Inuicte! Tu, qui Attidis / corpus accepisti, accipias cor/pus eius qui meas sarcinas / supstulit, qui me compilauit / de

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Fig. 7 and Fig. 8 Curse Tablet from Alcaçer do Sal, Portugal. Front and back view.

domo Hispani. Illius corpus / tibi et anima(m) do dono ut meas / res inuenuia(m). Tunc tibi ostia // quadripede(m), Do(mi)ne Attis, uoueo, / si eu(m) fure(m) inuenero. Dom(i)ne / Attis, te rogo per tu(u)m Nocturnum /ut me quam primu(m) compote(m) facias. “Oh Invincible Mistress Megara! You, who have received the body of Attis, dignify yourself to receive the body of whoever took my luggage, who stole it from the house of Hispano. I offer to you, as gift, the body and soul of that person so that I can find my things. If that thief is found, I promise you, o Lord Attis, a quadruped as victim. Oh Lord Attis, I implore you, by your Nocturnus, that you restitute my things as they were before”

The text in the first curse tablet is a paradigmatic example of what the tablet is intended to do which is manipulate, probably for personal benefit, the individuals being cursed. There is much that one can speculate concerning this first curse given that it is so succinct but it is not unreasonable to assume that it might have been produced in the context of a love-triangle in which the defigens wished that his or her competitor be separated from the one he or she loves (Faraone 1991b, 13). The second curse tablet is of much more interest to us because we find in this tablet a perfect example of the overlap of magic and religion. Unlike the first curse tablet, which is paradigmatic, the second curse tablet has elements which are indubitably of a religious nature which is why it cannot be considered a curse tablet stricto sensu. As we have seen above, one of the properties of magical practices is that of it being instrumental, with some scholars arguing that magic tends to be more manipulative and individualistic than religious rituals (Versnel 1991a, 178–179). This is exactly what we see in the first tablet, however, the second tablet contains notion of supplication and vow, as manifested by the use of the Latin verb rogo (implore) which is not particularly common in curse tablets (Versnel 1991b, 61). Furthermore, the deities that are commonly invoked in standard curse tablets are deities which are linked either to the underworld or to bodies of water (also connected to the underworld) as these deities would be more responsive to the anti-social and manipulative actions required by the curse. Thus, the deities that are invoked most frequently in curse tablets are Hermes, Kore/ Persephone, Hecate, Pluto, Ge, and Demeter (Versnel 1991b, 64). Moreover, it is precisely because of this connection to the underworld that had people in Ancient Greece and the Roman empire intentionally depositing curse tablets within the ground (Ribeiro 2006, 255) or in bodies of water like wells or rivers (Fox 1912; Tomlin 1988). The second tablet was found deposited within a temple, which is traditionally what is done with curse tablets, but it appeals to a deity (in fact, a mythological figure) which does not really fit the regular taxonomy of deities traditionally found in curse tablets.


Then what is the second tablet if not a curse tablet? Versnel has termed these inscriptions ‘judicial prayers’ (1991b). As he claims, the person who has suffered an injustice in antiquity which cannot be solved by ordinary means, had to rely on another authority: that of the Gods. Unlike traditional curses, the judicial prayer does have the direct intention of hurting someone but as an appeal so that justice is righted. Moreover, unlike traditional curse tablets in which the defigens coerces deities to act in their stead, judicial prayers have a supplicatory tone in which the defigens submits himself or herself to the will of the deity. This supplicatory tone is generally found in Ancient Greece and the Roman Empire but in religious contexts, yet here we find it in the format of what is traditionally assumed to be magical. At face value, this seems to support William Goode’s argument that religion and magic are actually just part of an inseparable continuum (1949). In Goode’s conception of religion and magic, an invocation of the muses, for instance, would lean more towards religion, a traditional curse tablet would lean more towards magic, and a judicial prayer, would fall somewhere in the spectrum between an invocation to the muses and a curse tablet. This would be acceptable if judicial prayer did not have an element which is not common in either traditional Greek or Roman magical practices which is justice. The fact that judicial prayers are an appeal towards justice to be enacted does not make it judicial prayers more religious, it makes it more juridical. So we have, in the case of the second tablet, not just an overlap of religion and magic but an overlap of religion, magic, and justice. These judicial prayers are prayers which try to incorporate what the defigens traditionally assumes is a just way of righting a wrong16, something that he knows not from religious or magical practices but by living in a historical context in which justice is enacted by several institutions. Therefore, an appeal to justice requires knowing what is just and what is not.

We have yet to answer why both curse tablets and judicial prayers are magical and not religious objects. An easy answer to this question would be to claim that both Greek and Romans viewed these items as magical, which they did.

9.4. the birth of an institution In the sequence of what was said in the previous sub-chapter, to understand magic is to understand the institutions of meaning involved in magic and know where they come from. In order to accept this, we cannot just assume that all societies are either religious, magical, or secular. Furthermore, societies cannot be conceived, by default, as either religious or secular. The reason why this is so is because religion, magic, and secularism are all products of historical development in that they can only be understood if we follow their development from a narrative point-of-view. Thus, secularism for instance, cannot be conceived as the mere rejection of religious ideas, in the same way that a restaurant cannot be conceived as the mere rejection of eating at home. Restaurants, like religions, have history. The greatest clue to understanding magic comes from the term itself, which we know, has its origin in the Greek magos (μάγος) and mageia (μαγεία). This term was researched by Arthur Darby Nock in the seminal paper Paul and the Magus (1972 [1933]) but his research failed to establish a proper link between the Greeks and Zoroastrianism, an ancient Persian religion, which is where the terms magos and mageia have been borrowed from (Bremmer 1999, 2). The Greek terms magos and mageia come undoubtedly from the Persian appellative magu-, and were used, according to Herodotus, to designate Iranian priests and their priestly functions. However, there is a second meaning to magos and mageia, which appears

16 There are, however, some cases in which the defigens demands a deity to punish whoever wronged them (Versnel 1991b, 69).

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in Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Euripides, to denote quacks, charlatans, and sorcerers (De Jong 1997, 387). It seems very likely that the two meanings ascribed to magos and mageia are not two distinct developments but rather the evolution of one meaning towards another. This would mean that at one point in time the terms magos, mageia, and derivatives, were used to denote Persian priests and their practices and later on they were used to denote quackery and sorcery. This evolution is present in the literature, namely in Oedipus Rex, where for example, Bremmer has noted: “[w]hen Oedipus has concluded that Creon has conspired with Teiresias to overthrow him, he denounces him for setting upon him ‘this magos hatcher of plots, this crafty begging priest, who has sight only when it comes to profit, but in his art is blind’” (Bremmer 1999, 3). It seems very likely that Sophocles, in using the term magos, was not just referring to any random quack, but an actual Persian priest. In Roman texts, we also find a connection between magos, in Latin as magus, and Persian religion in the work of Pliny. In Pliny, we find Zoroaster designated as the first magus (De Jong 1997, 168) implying that Zoroaster is simultaneously the founder of Zoroastrianism and of magic. In general, although it is possible to recognize two distinct trends in the literature, one in which magos are Persian priests, and another trend in which the magos are quacks and sorcerers, it is not unreasonable to suggest that magos might have objectively referred to one and the same thing after a certain time. This implies that Persian priests were seen by some Greeks as quacks, charlatans, and ultimately, as magicians in the sense we recognize today. An important conclusion can be derived from the relation between the ancient Greeks and Zoroastrianism: in and of itself, Zoroastrianism is not magic, it is a religion. It is only through the Greeks that Zoroastrianism becomes interpreted as magic. Having a religion of their own, the Greeks saw Zoroastrianism as a lesser art, something that was not as advanced as Greek religion. As Bremmer points out, Edward Tylor had noticed that some social groups call their neighbours ‘magicians’ like the Southern Scandinavians did with the Lapps and the Finns (1999, 6). This is also pres-

ent in some Australian tribes in which sometimes, strangers within a community or neighbouring tribes are accused of witchcraft (Mauss 2007 [1950], 38). This seems to be what happened in ancient Greece. In fact, in subsequent years, the image of magoi as quacks and charlatans became widespread to the point where practitioners of magical arts became professionals – not unlike snake oil peddlers during the eighteenth and nineteenth century in North America. I believe that it is this development that led to the widespread use of curse tablets in the whole Roman Empire. Although it is difficult to confirm, it is not unlikely that magic continued to carry the stigma of being something foreign – which is why in the Iberian Peninsula most curse tablets are found in cities where foreigners certainly abounded, e.g. Alcácer do Sal, Ampurias, Sagunto (Ribeiro 2006). A second clue comes from the language invested in some magical practices. Just like how some catholic rituals are still reliant on Latin – which provides the ritual with a certain gravitas, magical rituals were also performed at times in a language, a tone, or in a voice which resembled nothing human made (Burriss 1936, 142–143) – it is not unlikely that the Persian language might have given their ritual practices a connotation that was later interpreted as voces magicae (magical voices). Concomitantly, knowing a foreign language might have provided the magician with more credibility – in the same way that a martial artist might seem more credible if the artist is Asian. Thus, it is not unlikely that the presence of curse tablets in the Iberian Peninsula is due to the presence of foreigners wanting to make some extra money by selling their services to people who were looking to curse someone else. The lesson we can learn from this example is not that magic only arises from cultural friction but that one needs to look into history to understand how magic came into existence. In fact, there is no such things as magic, religion, and rituals, independent of their historical context – because it is the historical context itself that has provided us with an understanding of these concepts. Part of the problem of the scholarship of magic is the attempt to sever magic from history and analyse it as it were something immanent or general to a vast


number of societies – and naturally, given that magic manifests in different ways – it is nigh-impossible to reach a universal definition. As stated earlier in this chapter – it is important to have a generic understanding of

magic – which serves as a mental map, but this map becomes meaningless the moment we recognize the context in which it would have made sense for magic to exist.

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10 t h e l i f e a n d t i me s o f b ro n z e ag e p e o pl e

10.1. the undiscovered bronze age of southern alentejo Unlike the previous chapter which focused on a historical period of our past, this chapter intends to demonstrate the advantages of thinking of prehistoric periods through a historical perspective. Furthermore, unlike the previous chapter which contained critiques of general theories of magic, religion, and ritual, the Bronze Age period of Southern Alentejo, Portugal, has not been subsumed under general theories, with many scholars who study Bronze Age Europe disregarding it completely (Kristiansen/Larsson 2005), or addressing it in passing manner (Harding 2000), or reducing it to a generic culture group like “Iberian tradition” (Kristiansen 1998) or “Argaric Group” (Vandkilde 2013, 91–92). I do not intend, with these observations, to criticize the scholarship of these authors – I am merely pointing out how underrepresented Bronze Age studies from Portugal are in international circles. This underrepresentation is due, in part, to a general lack of research funding, lack of participation in international conferences, lack of international publications, and in part, also due to the late discovery of archaeological sites (Jiménez-Jáimez 2015)17. Although the Bronze age of Southern Alentejo was researched upon by Hermanfrid Schubart (1974, 1975), it was

Fig. 9 Map of the Iberian Peninsula. The black dot corresponds to the location of Outeiro Alto 2 and Torre Velha 3.

only from 2008 onwards, in the context of environmental and heritage assessment work, that a new picture of the prehistory of Southern Alentejo has come to light (Valera 2013a). Although the Southern Alentejo is still a big region, we will be focusing on two sites with Bronze Age occupation, which were excavated from 2008 to 2010 called Outeiro Alto 2 and Torre Velha 3, which are located close to the town of Brinches (see fig. 9). There are more Bronze Age sites in the surrounding region but I have chosen these two in particular because

17 Jiménez-Jáimez research is dedicated to Neolithic and Chalcolithic ditched-enclosures (IV to III millen nium BC) and not the Bronze Age. Nevertheless, the region that Jiménez-Jáimez focuses on is the Southern Alentejo and the problems which have conditioned Neolithic research in this area are ana logous to those which have affected Bronze Age research.

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Fig. 10 Geological Map of Southern Alentejo. The area marked by the red dotted line is the area where Outeiro Alto 2 and Torre Velha 3 can be found. This area and its surroundings is composed primarily of carbonates and conglomerates.

I was part of the projects that involved their excavation. Furthermore, Outeiro Alto 2 and Torre Velha 2 are the sites which are most representative of Bronze Age occupation in the region in terms of size and features excavated. The region in question is located in Southern Portugal, and is part of the Hesperian platform, demarcated in the South by the mountain range of the Caldeirão, and to the North by the mountain range of Portel. Unlike the region north of the mountain range of Portel, marked by the megalithic landscape (Gonçalves 1999, 2002; Gonçalves/Sousa 2003), the southern Alentejo, in particular, the immediate region surrounding river Guadiana, is devoid of stone structures (fig. 10). The Southern Alentejo, on the left bank of the river Guadiana, is geologically represented by Miocene clays, limestones, and conglomerates (fig. 10) and prehistoric archaeology is represented primarily by negative structures. This is the case of the Neolithic/Chalcolithic site of Perdigões (Valera et al. 2000), the Neolithic/Chalcolithic site of Porto Torrão (Valera/Filipe 2004), the Neolithic and Bronze Age site of Outeiro Velho 2 (Filipe et al. 2014, Valera/Filipe 2010), and the Bronze

Age and Roman site of Torre Velha 3 (Alves et al. 2010, 2012). While I will be focusing primarily on the Bronze Age, a historical understanding requires not only an analysis of the record dated to the Bronze Age but also a consideration of the trends that have come from earlier times. Outeiro Alto 2 is located on a small elevation, not unlike other elevations which mark the region. This elevation, nevertheless allows clear visibility to other sites, such as the Neolithic/Chalcolithic site of Alto da Forca (Caeiro, 1985; Lopes/Carvalho/Gomes, 1997) and the site of Torre Velha 3 (Alves et al. 2010, 2012). Like Outeiro Alto 2, Torre Velha 3 is also located on a small rise, with good surrounding visibility. The toponym ‘Torre Velha’ translates to ‘old tower’ which itself is a good indication of the presence of archaeological features, but this toponym probably refers to the roman occupation of Torre Velha and not to its prehistoric occupation which did not reveal any positive structures. The reason for this lack of positive structures is due to the lack of stone in the region, which can be found further north, in the mountain range of Alportel, further south in

10 The Life and Times of Bronze Age People

the mountain range of Caldeirão, and in the dolomitic region to the east. Instead of stone, the region in question is based on geological miocenic substrate composed primarily of carbonates and conglomerates, i.e. chalk. Thus, what we see in both Outeiro Alto 2 and Torre Velha 3 are negative structures, e.g. pits, ditches, and hypogea (fig. 11 and fig. 12). The topsoil at both sites is a dark loamy soil which ranges in depth from 50 cm to 70 cm. This soil did not reveal any prehistoric finds, but in Torre Velha, it did reveal a large number of roman finds from pottery sherds, tiles, opus signinum, and opus caementicium. This is congenial with the accounts that state that the Southern Alentejo was agriculturally explored from the late roman period (fourth century AD) onwards (Alarcão 1988). Furthermore it is also known that this same region underwent heavy agricultural investments during the government of Salazar (c. 1940 to c 1970 (Carmo 2007, 812)). Although there are no prehistoric finds in the topsoil, the agricultural exploration of this region did not affect the layers that are below the topsoil as the prehistoric negative structures did not reveal any disturbed layers. As stated earlier, Outeiro Alto 2 and Torre Velha 3 are composed primarily of negative structures and of these, there are a total of 108 discrete negative structures in Outeiro Alto 2 and 589 in Torre Velha 3. In Outeiro Alto 2, of the 108 structures there are a total of 14 hypogea, no identifiable Bronze Age pit burial, two pit burials dated to the Neolithic, and 20 pits containing prehistoric material. In Torre Velha 3, of the 589 structures, 25 are hypogea, seven are Bronze Age burial pits, and 24 pits containing prehistoric material culture (see fig. 13). As fig. 13 shows, Torre Velha 3 contains a larger number of overall negative structures but only a small number of those date to the Bronze Age. This is because Torre Velha 3 contains a large number of pits pertaining to the Imperial Roman period (from the second century AD to IV century AD) and the late antiquity period (fifth century AD onwards), which are not included in the current analysis. The chronology of these features were attributed through the cross analysis of finds of these sites with those of which have been se-

Fig. 11 General view of part of Outeiro Alto 2.

Fig. 12 General view of Torre Velha 3.

Feature

Outeiro Alto 2

Torre Velha 3

108

589

12

25

N/A

7

2

N/A

20

24

Total Negative Structures Hypogea (Bronze Age) Pits (contains burial, Bronze Age) Pits (contains burial, Neolithic) Pits (Neolithic, Chalcolithic, Bronze Age)

Fig. 13 Table with overall number of negative structures, hypogea, and pits of Outeiro Alto 2 and Torre Velha 3.

curely dated to the Neolithic, Chalcolithic, and the Bronze Age. There is much contention regarding when the transition of the Mesolithic to the Neolithic occurred in the Alentejo region, although it might be safe to say that the Neolithic is fully present at the end of the VI millennium BC, as demonstrated by the

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material culture and radiocarbon dating of the site of Vale Pincel (Zilhão 1998) and Valada do Mato (Diniz 2001). Concerning the late Neolithic and the Chalcolithic (second half of the IV millennium BC until the second half of the III millennium BC), the sites which have been dated are Perdigões (Márquez Romero et al. 201; Valera/Hecker/Costa 2014), Porto Torrão (Arnaud 1993; Valera 2013b), and Outeiro Alto 2 (Valera 2013a). The Chalcolithic in the Alentejo region establishes itself quite clearly from a cultural pointof-view from the Neolithic through the adoption of the Beaker Bell (a local adaptation known as Horizonte de Ferradeira) and the gradual transition to fortified sites. Based on the dating of São Pedro, it is safe to say that the Chalolithic is fully present around 3000 BC (Mataloto/Boaventura 2009). The transition from Chalcolithic to Bronze Age is considerably more contentious in the Southern Alentejo as there is a considerable overlap between the cultural elements attributable to the Chalcolithic and that of the Bronze Age. It was Schubart who first defined the chronology of the Bronze Age in Southern Alentejo, beginning at 1500 BC and ending around 700 BC (1975). This dating has been challenged by Soares and Cabral (1984) who estimates that the Bronze Age culture of Southern Alentejo starts around 2100 BC. Assuming that Soares and Cabral are correct, we have a late Chalcolithic / early Bronze Age that goes up to 1700 BC, the middle Bronze Age starting around 1700 or 1600 BC, and the late Bronze Age starting around 1200 BC, until the first Iron Age which is around 700 BC. Some of the faunal material of Torre Velha 3 has been dated (Alves et al. 2010, 146), and the dates range from 1600 to 1500 (calibrated 2σ) which would put the occupation of this site in the middle Bronze Age. Although the Bronze Age material of Outeiro Alto 2 has not yet been dated through radiocarbon, I am assuming that the occupation of this site occurs around the same time, immediately after, or immediately before that of Torre Velha 3. Unlike ditched-enclosures of the Neolithic and Chalcolithic, the Bronze Age structures of Outeiro Alto 2 and Torre Velha 3 are not confined, i.e. they are not closed off from the rest

of the landscape. While ditched-enclosure sites like Perdigões and Porto Torrão are sites that have a centre surrounded by concentric ditches, there are no visible structures that separate the pits and hypogea of Outeiro Alto 2 and Torre Velha 3 from other areas. Furthermore, these Bronze Age sites were excavated in the context of commercial archaeology – and in Portugal this means that excavations are confined to the areas which are affected by construction. Thus, it is very difficult to delineate the spatial limits of these sites. For instance, Outeiro Alto 1 is comprised of pits dating to the Bronze Age and is about 200 m away from Outeiro Alto 2, which means that Outeiro Alto 1 and 2 are the same archaeological site, and the only reason why they are considered two separate sites is because is of how excavation projects are organized in Portugal. Regarding the Bronze Age, Outeiro Alto 2 and Torre Velha 3 only has two types of feature: pits and hypogea. The choice for the term ‘hypogeum’, which in Greeks means ‘underground’, comes from the recognition of the similarities between these structures and the underground funerary structures of Mycenean Greece. Although Mycenean shaft graves are more akin to Chalcolithic tholoi, it is not entirely unreasonable to believe that the Bronze Age hypogea of Outeiro Alto 2 and Torre Velha 3 are the evolution of the tholos structure. Of the 12 hypogea which were identified at Outeiro Alto 2, it is possible to discern some variability between the shapes and sizes of the structures, and these were subdivided into four different types (fig. 14) (Filipe et al. 2013, 11). Type A, which total six, are structures which are conventionally called ‘hypogea’ and have the following characteristics: a rectangular or square shaped antechamber dug into the chalk, with vertical or sub-vertical walls and a flat surface; within the antechamber one can access the circular niche – the funerary chamber – which could only have been dug from within the antechamber. The access to the funerary chamber is through a small passage which is sealed with schist slabs and mud (possibly manure) (fig. 15). In general, the antechambers are about 2 m wide and 1 m deep (counting from the top of the bedrock level) and the funerary chamber is 1,5 m in diameter


Fig. 14 The 4 types of hypogea of Outeiro Alto 2.

and 1 meter in height from surface to top. In terms of content, the funerary chamber contains, with the exception of one hypogea, a single inhumation, in fetal position, with grave goods consisting of ceramic vessels, one or two metal objects like a dagger with rivets or an awl, and the deposition of mammal bones. Type B structures, which total 4, are more irregular than the type A structures. Unlike the type A structures which have clearly defined rectangular or square shape, type B structures tend to have an irregularly shaped antechamber, which in some cases resembles a circle and in some cases resembles an ovaloid. These structures also contain a funerary structure which is cut into the chalk and is separated from the antechamber by slabs of rock and mud. In terms of content, the grave goods are of the same nature as those of type A structures but in type B, the individuals are not in foetal position but are reduced, i.e. the bones of a single inhumation are pushed to one of the sides or to the back of the chamber (Filipe et al. 2013, 114). Unlike type A and type B, which constitute the majority of the hypogea, type C and D only have one example respectively which has led me to assume that they are actually just variations of type B structures. In the case of Type C, the structure in question presented the same characteristics of those of type B, but it contained only one individual and the grave goods consisted of only a copper awl. Type D on the other hand, differs from the other structures by not having a chamber but it nevertheless has a single burial and grave goods consisting of two ceramic vessels. In terms of dimensions, both type C and D structures were smaller,

Fig. 15 A hypogeum at Outeiro Alto 2 – The entrance of the funerary chamber which has been sealed with slabs of stone and mud.

with the type C having an antechamber of a little over 1m and a chamber of about the same length, and type D having a diameter of c. 1,30 m. The hypogea of Torre Velha 3 are virtually identical to those of Outeiro Alto 2 (Alves et al. 2010, 133–153), although the archaeologists have chosen to follow a different classification scheme based on the shape of the antechamber when seen from above, which can be squareshaped, rectangular-shaped18, ovaloid-shaped, and pit-shaped (Alves et al. 2010, 137). Similar to Outeiro Alto 2, the most common type of hypogea in Torre Velha 3 are those which are square or rectangular in shape, which total 17, and the hypogea which were ovaloid or pitshaped amounted to six. All the characteristics

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Fig. 16 Torre Velha 3 hypogeum – The interior of the funerary chamber.

Fig. 17 The filling of the antechamber of a hypogeum.

of the hypogea which were seen above with regard to Outeiro Alto 2 are reflected in Torre Velha 3, from the dimensions, the use of slabs to seal the funerary chamber, and the grave goods (fig. 16). Similar to Outeiro Alto 2, the hypogea of Torre Velha 3 are intended for single interments, however, we find five cases of reduction in which a previous deposition is

pushed to the side and a new body is deposited, one case in which the previous deposition of a body is reduced to an ossuary, and one case of double-interment. The stratigraphy of these structures provides some clues as to what the funerary ritual consisted of. First of all, it is more than evident that the hypogea are intended to be underground structures in that the objective is not simply to bury people, like in cist graves, but to have the dead belong in a place that separates them from the living. During the archaeological excavation, the removal of the topsoil removed the chalk which served as the cover of some of the funerary chamber, nevertheless, it is clear that the funerary chamber was not excavated from the surface during the Bronze Age, but from the antechamber. This means that in terms of sequence of actions we can say that in the Bronze Age the antechamber was excavated first, followed by the excavation of the funerary chamber. It also seems safe to say that in both Outeiro Alto 2 and Torre Velha 3 the funerary ritual consists of the interment of single individuals, and the hypogea which contain more than one individual are cases in which the hypogea are re-opened to deposit a second individual. For instance, in fig. 16 we see a case in which an earlier interment is reduced, i.e. pushed towards the back of the funerary chamber, to allow space for a later interment. A close look at fig. 16 also reveals the following: both the earlier interment and the later one are placed directly upon the chamber floor – which one can see is the bedrock – a reddish and whitish grainy deposit. This tells us that during the time between the first and the second interment, no soil was deposited within the funerary chamber. Another clue comes from the antechamber – which, during the archaeological excavation, were very hard to perceive because the deposit which fills the antechamber is the same colour as the bedrock (fig. 17). This provides us with information concerning the sequence of actions that are associated

18 Alves et al. have chosen to separate two different types of rectangular-shaped hypogea based on where the funerary chamber is located in relation to the antechamber (Alves et al. 2010, 137).


to the construction of these structures and their ritual. As stated above, the first action that occurred during the preparation of these structures was the excavation of the antechamber; this is followed by the excavation of the circular niche which serves as a funerary chamber; once the funerary chamber is excavated, a body is deposited within along with grave goods; once the body is interred and the grave goods are deposited, the funerary chamber is sealed with stone slabs and mud; finally, the soil that was removed when the antechamber was excavated is used as backfill. In the cases in which there is a second interment, the sequence of actions is: the backfill that fills the antechamber of a hypogea is removed; the mud and the stone slabs which cover the entrance of the funerary chamber are also removed; a previous interment is pushed towards the back or towards the sides of the chamber (reduction), and the new interment is placed along with more grave goods; once this is done, the funerary chamber is sealed once again with stone slabs and mud; and the antechamber is backfilled again (Filipe et al. 2013, 122–124). Naturally, it seems more than likely that this process was accompanied at times by rituals which leave no archaeological trace. The reason I am inclined to believe this has to do with the dimensions of the antechamber. Some antechambers reached 4 m in length and given these dimensions, it seems reasonable to conclude that the antechamber was more than just a work area for the excavation of funerary chamber. Unlike the pit structures in the same area, which have varying shapes and sizes, the antechambers of hypogea structures have straight walls and a flat base – which suggests that the antechamber might have served as an area where rituals could be enacted. As stated earlier, the grave goods consist of pottery, daggers and/or awls, and animal meat. Unlike the actual funerary structures which were virtually unknown until 2008, the pottery and the metal artifacts are known from other Bronze Age sites in the vicinity such as Passo Alto (Soares 2003) and Atalaia (Schubart 1975). However, there is one type of pottery that is not found in this region outside hypogea cemeteries and these are the strangled-neck vases (fig. 18) and pots with sharp

Fig. 18 Outeiro Alto 2 – Two strangled-neck vases in the centre and right.

Fig 19 Outeiro Alto 2 – Pots with sharp inflection.

inflection (fig. 19). Unlike the standard Bronze Age pottery of this region, the strangled-neck vases and the pots with sharp inflection are present in El-Argar (Schubart 2004). Another interesting element is the presence of articulated animal bones among the grave goods which indicates that animal meat was offered alongside the pottery and the metal artifacts. Like some of the pottery vessels, offering animal meat is one of the practices recognized in El-Argar culture (Aranda Jimenéz/ Esquivel Guerrero 2008). The presence of these elements at Outeiro Alto 2 and Torre Velha 3 is of interest and we will see why further below.

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10.2. problematizing economy and meaning in prehistoric times Now that we have a brief description of the main features of Outeiro Alto 2 and Torre Velha 3 we can consider how these features relate to the traditional interpretation of Bronze Age in Southern Portugal and what it entails to our understanding of this period. Traditionally, the Bronze Age occupation of this region is designated as ‘Bronze do Sudoeste’ or ‘Southwest Culture’ and is described as occupying Southern Alentejo, the Algarve, and Western Andalucia (Lillios 2014, 556). In general, this period is poorly known and even though the work developed at Outeiro Alto 2 and Torre Velha 3 does allow us to have a better insight into the region, we are still very far from having complete picture of what the Bronze Age occupation of the region entailed (Alves et al. 2012). António Monge Soares sees two distinct periods in the Bronze Age of this region (1994, 179): the middle Bronze Age as represented by Outeiro Alto 2 and Torre Velha 3 and the Late Bronze Age as represented by fortified sites such as Misericordia, Passo Alto, Atalaia, and individual cist burials (Soares 1988; 2003; 2005). This has led Soares to conclude that the middle Bronze Age corresponds to a very distinct form of occupation and socio-economic context in which urbanism contracted in the late Chalcolithic / early Bronze Age to only recover fully in the late Bronze Age. Moreover, no domestic sites have been identified which correspond to the period of the middle Bronze Age which has led Soares to believe that the Bronze Age groups of the region were undergoing a period of weak social structuration, where people lived in temporary campsites and were practicing mobile agriculture (Soares 1994, 179). Given the lack of more contextual information in relation to the Southwest Culture, there really is not much that can be said without speculation. Thus, what Soares states concerning the middle Bronze Age seems acceptable prima facie. Nevertheless, the hypogea cemeteries of Outeiro Alto 2 and Torre Velha 3 are not commensurate with Soares’ explanation.

First, the hypogea contain a wealth of grave goods, of which I would need to emphasize the presence of animal meat, which is not present in the Chalcolithic and in the late Bronze Age of the same region - but is present in large fortified sites such as those found in El Argar. Second, the presence of grave goods in individual burials is equated to the presence of elites in the late Bronze Age (Santos et al. 2008, 84) – if this is true, then the presence of rich grave goods in the middle Bronze Age must also entail the presence of elites. Third, and most importantly, the funerary ritual follows a pattern that goes from the Neolithic / Chalcolithic with collective burials and gradually moving to individualized burials in the Bronze Age. Although Soares does make a good point in arguing that the middle Bronze Age seems less ‘impressive’ than the periods that preceded and followed it, we are unsure how the hypogea and pits actually fit in the explanation he has provided. It is not that he is incorrect in his assessment because it is entirely reasonable to assume that the middle Bronze Age did undergo a period of economic contraction while simultaneously maintaining practices that are assigned to richer periods and regions. The question we must ask ourselves is why did the populations of the region in question maintain practices associated to richer regions (El Argar) even though there were undergoing an economic contraction? This is where the topics addressed in the previous chapter become relevant. The discrepancy we see between what appears to be an economic contraction in the middle Bronze Age and the continued display of richness in the hypogea cemeteries is a discrepancy that was also addressed by Ian Hodder but in relation to the Neolithic Europe. Although addressing a period and scope which is very different from that presented here, Hodder’s interpretation of the megalithic structures of the Atlantic façade is a good springboard for understanding the relation between funerary practices and meaning. In 1984, Hodder argued that the study of megalithic monuments in the Atlantic façade concerned generalizations that were ultimately unhelpful to understanding the megaliths as an ideological phenomenon (1984, 52). For Hodder, the Neolithic megaliths were much


more than territory markers or evidence of social-economic tensions in Europe, as suggested by Renfrew (1976). The alternative presented by Hodder takes into account an issue which had been ignored thus far which concerned the similarities between megalithic tombs in the Atlantic façade and earlier central European long-houses. For Hodder, the symbolism of the central European long-houses is linked to strategies revolving around male-female relationships and the control of labour (1984, 53). How does Hodder reach this conclusion? By providing an analogy from the Baringo district of Kenya: “Although it would be difficult to place much reliance on these ethnographic analogies without a careful consideration of the contexts involved, the widespread relationship between varying elaboration of the domestic context and the varying position of women is suggestive. This suggests that the type of organisation of space found in the long-houses of central Europe is likely to be linked to social strategies of control and seclusion. We are not dealing here with houses or rooms with multiple access, with courtyard plans or agglomerations of single rooms. Inner rooms can only be reached through outer rooms, in a linear sequence. The inner rooms are secluded and access is controlled. Also, house and pottery decoration draws attention to the domestic space and to food and drink which must at least partly have been prepared by women. The preparation and provision of food in the domestic context, for adults and offspring, has great symbolic potential in any society concerned with the reproduction and expansion of its labour power and with the control over its reproductive and productive potential.” (Hodder 1984, 62). By associating the Baringo social organization to the long-houses of early and middle Neolithic of central Europe, and these longhouses to the megalithic structures of Western Europe (1984, 63), Hodder provided a holistic explanation of how and why these were constructed and used as funerary monuments. This type of explanation, which is very characteristic of the early postprocessual type of

explanations and which Hodder represents brilliantly, is in direct contrast to the processual type of explanations which places economics at the forefront as represented by Colin Renfrew’s ‘territorial model’ (Chapman 1995; Renfrew 1976). However, while Hodder could be entirely correct, this type of answer was very unsatisfactory to many archaeologists due to its speculative nature (sensu Kohl 1993). Moreover, to advance the explanation above, Hodder had to rely on living societies as an analogy for the Neolithic societies he was investigating. Ignoring the fact that Hodder advised extreme caution in the use of cross-cultural analogy (1982a, 13), we must ask if Hodder would have reached the same conclusion concerning the megalithic tombs of Western Europe had he not had access to the ethnographic data obtained among the Baringo tribes (1982b). As is often the case, we are asking the wrong questions and a self-reflexive exercise is necessary to understand why: the problem lies in the imagined conflict between economic and ideological reasons for why the megaliths exist. As Hodder states, individuals during the Neolithic could only act when they are within an ideology which provides a sense for why they act, an ideology which is historically contingent (1984, 66), however, Hodder should have continued this line of reasoning and concluded that these individuals do not act because of the ideology per se. Without acknowledging this fact, it is very easy to believe that somehow, the megaliths were built because the Neolithic populations of Western Europe believed in an ideology which promoted gender segregation and the control of descent. Although Hodder does not explicitly state that the megaliths were built due to beliefs in an ideology, by putting ideology at the forefront, Hodder is implying that the ideology is the reason why the megaliths were built and used. Assuming that the megaliths had ritual significance, i.e. that there were rituals associated to them, and it seems very probable that they were, we can consider Talal Asad’s comments on approaches to ritual. When Asad wrote Genealogies of Religion (1993), there were two main approaches when it came to explaining rituals: the instrumental and the symbolic. This distinction between the instrumental and

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symbolic was popularized by Radcliffe-Brown who saw technical acts as instrumental, acts to which there is a purpose and the purpose itself serves as justification for the act. Ritual acts, on the other hand, have a symbolic meaning attached to them which means that for Radcliffe-Brown, technical acts could be explained in causal terms but ritual acts required recognizing a meaning (Radcliffe-Brown 1952 [1939], 143 cited in Asad 1993, 126). Naturally, accepting megaliths as symbolically relevant would mean that Hodder has followed the route of the ideological in which the megaliths must have an underlying meaning, otherwise they would remain poorly explained. The idea that rituals are within the domain of meaning aligns with the postprocessual agenda that Hodder was defending at the time – as Asad states, by subsuming ritual to the symbolic, “ritual becomes principally the object of a reading, like a text with true meanings that can be deciphered only by initiates-practitioners and anthropologists alike” (1993, 129). Asad’s own work on religion is very different from the one exemplified by Hodder primarily because Asad does not see rituals subsumed to the domain of the symbolic nor the instrumental (1993, 130). Although Asad does not linger more on the subject of symbolism and instrumentality, I believe part of his unsatisfaction with the distinction lies in the fact that instrumentality and symbolism alone do not themselves explain why rituals are practiced. This links to the issues addressed in chapter 2 and 3 concerning the modes of explanation – while Hodder has in fact moved away from the causal mode of explanation, he has not recognized the distinction between the teleological and the narrative modes. According to the teleological mode, the intention of a social actor towards an object is one that can be justified by a reason. With this in mind, when someone justifies their regular church attendance because they believe in God, the answer archaeologists are looking is not the belief in God in itself but why someone would believe in God. To understand why someone would believe in God is to think of the Church and its members in a narrative mode and identify why the Church gained the influence it did. Similarly, with regards to both the Neolithic and the Bronze Age, the answer lies not in

identifying the ideology per se which is used as a justification for why the people in the Neolithic built megaliths and hypogea in the Bronze Age – one needs to see the ideology itself from a historical viewpoint. This seems like a rather daunting task for the archaeologist who investigates prehistoric periods, but once again, we need to recall some of the ideas that were developed in this thesis, namely that of institutions of meaning. While Hodder’s meanings were mostly subjective and speculative, institutions of meaning are objective in that if a social member acts in a purposeful in society, it is because he is consciously or unconsciously aware of institutions without which he or she could not act.

10.3. economic meaning Central to understanding prehistoric Europe in general, and the Bronze Age in particular, is the recognition that there cannot be dichotomy that separates the instrumental and the symbolic, or in other words, of economic practices and ideological ones. This seems to have been perceived by Johannes Müller and his team with regards to how the sphere of ritual practices and economy are interrelated in Central and Northern Germany and Denmark (Müller 2008; Müller et al. 2013). However, this research can be taken further and given more historical depth if the sphere of ritual practices and economy are not only addressed side-by-side but fully collapsed onto one another. This would require perceiving the archaeological record, in our case, as representing economy and ideology as one single category of analysis. In order to achieve this, one needs to think of economy at its most basic. In archaeology, economy has been addressed primarily through quantitative methods, especially in the context of processual archaeology (Earle 2002). Like processual archaeologists, postprocessual archaeologists were also fully aware of the importance of economy, however, economy played a secondary role in relation to the ideological (e.g. Hodder 1982a, 14; Tilley 1994, 20–21). Naturally, archaeology can and


should investigate contexts which can be economic and/or ideological but an understanding of both contexts requires us to recognize both these contexts in terms of their institutions of meaning. As this thesis has argued so far, past societies cannot be analysed under the same institutions of meaning as those we are familiar with in the modern world and thus – in terms of economy – we need to separate those social and economic meanings which are understood today, e.g. surplus, elite, manufacture, production, etc. and the economic meanings of the society under study. Modern economic concepts can be applied to past societies, however, in applying them, we are automatically skipping an integral process in archaeology which is interpreting how these past societies came to accept these concepts. At its worse, this lack of historical understanding has led archaeologists to apply concepts and explanations in an anachronic fashion to the past. For instance, hunter-gatherer economy is commonly referred to as a subsistence economy involving ‘hard-labour’, where surplus accumulation is impossible and scarcity abounded (Sahlins 1972, 3–4). The problem with this view is that it suggest that hunter-gatherer groups had and have impulses characteristic of ‘bourgeoisie’ classes when their subsistence economy should be seen as more than enough to guarantee their health and reproduction (Sahlins 1972, 4–5). Imposing modern economic concepts onto past societies is following the formalist view of economics, in which ready-made models are taken as universally valid (Polanyi 1944; Sahlins 1972, xi). Anthropologists and archaeologists have recognized the inadequacy of the formalist view of economics (Earle 2002; Graeber 2001; Sahlins 1972) and have recommended the substantivist view which requires the development of concepts and models which are adequate to the societies under study. Classic examples of this type of research is Sahlins’ domestic mode of production (1972, chapter 3) and Mauss’ study on reciprocal exchange (1966). Even though anthropologists and archaeologists are aware that the economic concepts and models need to adapt the societies under analysis, most of them take some basic concepts as given. For instance, in his excellent

study of Bronze Age economics, Timothy Earle states that: “Economies are open systems of production, distribution, and consumption of material things and social services. Economies involve resources extracted and goods manufactured, commodities and labor moved, and goods and services consumed in everyday life and in exceptional situations. From family meals to community religious ceremonies to imperial wars and affairs of state, economics provision and support human action. Economies vary greatly, and economic anthropology describes those differences and proposes how they emerge and make a difference.” (Earle 2002, 8). Although very a pragmatic definition, Earle has attached a series of key-concepts to economy like ‘goods’, ‘resource’, ‘commodities’, ‘labor’, and ‘material things’, concepts which automatically precludes a series of economic perspectives which might enlighten how we perceive prehistoric economy. First of all, it could be objected that economy does not only involve the consumption of material things given that there are, in the present and past, a whole series of objects which are non-material yet nevertheless are part of economic systems, e.g. music, salvation, knowledge. In fact, to understand the practice of rituals from an economic standpoint it is necessary to understand economy as more than just labour allocation (the instrumental view) or as a representation of cosmological world-views (the symbolic view). A second issue with Earle’s definition of economy concerns ‘goods’ and ‘commodities’. Facetiousness aside, I must ask whether dirt and stones can be considered economic ‘goods’. Obviously, understanding an economic system by analysing the value of every little object that could be accessed by the members within the system is untenable but we must assume that different things do hold different value which is how some objects become ‘goods’ while others do not. Therefore, it is necessary to understand how things become ‘valuable’. In 1986, Igor Kopytoff published a paper titled The cultural biography of things: commoditization as process, which is, to my knowledge, one of the

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best studies in the anthropology of value. In this paper, Kopytoff points out that in our world, the common objects of our economy represent the natural universe of commodities and on the opposite end of the spectrum, humans represent the natural universe of individuation and singularization. This image of the world, however, is not an accurate one as we recognize that humans can also be treated as objects, by medium of ‘slavery’ (1986, 64). As westerners, an object is more than its physical qualities, it is something that can be bought, owned, used, and thrown away. These objects have a value and as such can be transacted for something of equivalent value. The idea of transaction already involves the institution of private property, in that there are things that can be mine (or ours) and things that are yours. An object, such as a cellphone for instance, is a commodity in that it has a certain value and can be transacted. But so can a three-storey house but there are more people on this planet that have cellphones than three-storey houses. This means that, historically, through the process of transaction, cellphones became an object that was more desired and as such, they became gradually better and cheaper, and even though today there are more and better cellphones than there were 20 years ago, they have less value today than they did 20 years ago. This value is not merely monetary – it also has to do with how common something is. In the late 1990’s not everyone had a cellphone and today, even in some of the poorest parts of the world, some people can accrue four or up to five cellphones. This process of commoditization of cellphones is one that has homogenized its social value. This process is a historical process of becoming and not one of being (Kopytoff 1986, 73), as the values of objects are constantly changing. In the opposite end of the spectrum, there is the process of singularization. This process is one in which objects exit the network of circulation, in which other objects, such as cellphones, remain. Examples of objects that have been singularized in the western world are art collections, public lands, the paraphernalia of political power, ritual objects, etc. (Kopytoff 1986, 73). Both processes are simultaneously ‘economic’ and ‘social’, ‘economic’ in that these

processes involve recognizing the value of objects and ‘social’ in the sense that this value is institutionalized. Kopytoff ’s notions of ‘commoditization’ and ‘singularization’ are of immense value to archaeology because they allows us to see the artifacts that we uncover as actual object that were part of the practices in which institutions of meaning are in effect. So for instance, the identification of a type of silex, like that of Rio Maior, Portugal (Carvalho/ Gibaja 2005) and its use across other areas of the Iberian Peninsula, might be more than just evidence of trade but also evidence of a process of commoditization. Historically, each case must be treated as its own and the commoditization process of one society might not have parallel in other societies. Furthermore, one must also consider that what Kopytoff addresses as ‘transaction’ might involve a set of institutions that complicate matters further. David Graeber’s study of the notion of debt is a good example in which transaction might involve much more than just bartering and direct trade (2011). Trade must necessarily involve some agreement between social groups because objects do not have a fixed value which means that boots might be more valuable than potatoes on one day and less valuable on another. Thus, trade requires trust between members of the same social group. This is idea is also true of singularized objects – the crown of the Queen of England is only singular because British people have agreed to her authority. Without the authority, the title of ‘Queen’ and her crown are meaningless.

10.4. death and the value of life in the bronze age How does this all relate to the Bronze Age of Southern Alentejo? In his analysis of the Neolithic megalithic landscape, Hodder was correct in emphasizing the need for an ideological understanding, but in the process, created a rift between ideology and economy. To understand what was going on at Outeiro Alto 2 and Torre Velha 3 we need to recognize the ideology and economy as one single system.


Now, as Kopytoff ’s biography of objects demonstrate – we can only understand value in terms of how objects enter and exit economic and social processes, and this has been brilliantly addressed in the work of David Fontijn with regards to the Bronze Age of the Low Countries (2002, 2013). However, I believe that the value concept has not been explored to its full potential and value is still seen primarily as an economic property of physical objects and not of people. I find the lack of an in-depth study of people as objects with value a bit disconcerting given that Kopytoff ’s biographical approach is based on his earlier work on slavery in Africa in which people became commodified (Kopytoff 1986, 64–65). In fact, like Earle above (2002), value itself seems to be a given with many scholars accepting its ‘face value’ (no pun intended), with the ‘face’ referring to the visible and inert object. Thus, although scholars recognize the importance of the substantivist view of economics, many are reproducing the same assumptions as those found in the formalist view (Graeber 2001, 23). With regards to the Bronze Age of Southern Alentejo we need to think in two different dimensions: that of the transactional value and that of individual identity. To start off, the conception of value we must first address is that in which value can be understood as exchange – in the sense that one object or type of object has an intrinsic value which allows its exchange. This is not the only way to think about value (Graeber 2001, 31), nor is it the most important one but it is necessary for our purposes here. The reason why transactional value is important is because middle Bronze Age societies of disparate regions were exchanging objects and it was necessary to recognize the value of one object in relation to another. Given the lack of a currency, these exchanges were probably very delicate affairs, sometimes with dire consequences (Sahlins 1972, 302). We need now, to think of this historically: somewhere during the transition from the late Chalcolithic to the Bronze Age, the meaning of trade must have emerged in a way that distinguishes itself from other forms of exchange like reciprocal gift-giving (Mauss 1966). Why is that? In David Graeber‘s study of ancient debt, he points out that trade – could not have

been possible unless there was a “double coincidence of wants” – in which two independent people, or groups of people, wish to exchange objects at the same time (2011, 34). For instance, how does one exchange a pair of boots for a bag of potatoes when there is no external reference (currency) to which one can measure the value of boots and potatoes? For the transaction between boots and potatoes to occur smoothly, it would be necessary for the person who owns boots and the person who owns potatoes to want – at exactly the same time – to exchange the products they own. If only one of them wants an object, then it would be difficult to exchange the object one has with someone who does not want your object. Given that objects do not have an intrinsic value - there must have been an economic/ moral system in which people deposit their trust in other human beings (a social group) prior to the existence of currency – thus creating a system in which one is constantly in debt to those other human beings. It would only be possible to obtain other objects by submitting oneself to this economic/moral system. Technically, even when currency emerges, a currency served not as metric of value of objects, be it boots or potatoes, but the measure of one’s trust on other people (Graeber 2011, 47). Prima facie, this economic system would look like any other system of exchange of goods – but in terms of institution of meaning – there is an element of trust, in that, the institutionalized value of objects is one based on the importance of objects in a community. Naturally, the ‘exchange’ we are interested is the one that intersects with the institution of value – because without recognizing value – any social behaviour can be considered a form of exchange (sensu Homans 1958). A notion of ‘exchange’ without recognition of value makes the notion of exchange too diluted to be of any use – it would be impossible to recognize the difference between Palaeolithic trade and Bronze Age trade in terms of institutions. As a thought-experiment, let us consider two cases of ‘exchange’ without thinking of them in terms of value - in the first case, a mother, father, and their child are walking down a street. The mother is carrying the child, while the father is holding a bottle of juice. After a short while, the mother gets tired and hands over the

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child to the father and the father hands over the bottle of juice. In the second case, a person goes to a store a pays 1000 € for a television. With these two cases in mind: if we were think of exchange merely as ‘goods’ going from one person to another – then both of these cases would have to be considered exchange! To understand trade as a form of economic exchange, it is also necessary to recognize the narrative intelligibility in which objects accrue transactional value – a value which is considered by those who exchange these objects as intrinsic to the object itself and thus, can be replaced by another object of equal value. This is, I believe what happens in the Bronze Age – trade becomes institutionalized. In chapter 5 I provide an example in which an English scientist goes to a Japanese restaurant and how the scientist unconsciously recognizes the institutions of meaning associated to eating out. The economic practice of eating out at restaurants, like trade in prehistory, is something that developed through time, and I believe that trade is something that developed through time in prehistory and culminating in the middle Bronze Age. However, while the Bronze Age does reveal a new form of economic meaning associated to trade, there is still the moral element attached to the economic system but at the same time we start witnessing the rise of the sovereign value of objects. It is only by recognizing value as something independent from the community, and property as something alienated (Earle 2000, 43–44), that we can start understanding the processes which involve the rise of elites, competition, hierarchies, and heterarchies. This leads to the second dimension concerning the Bronze Age of Southern Alentejo: individual identity. As stated in chapter 6, the individual serves as a poor foundational unit to understanding societies because individuality only becomes evident during the rise of western liberalism. However, it might have been in the European Bronze Age that individuality made its first mark. How so? As Siedentop points out, the feudal society of tenth and eleventh century Europe laid the foundations to what would later become western liberalism (2014, 165) where the social member gradually freed itself from the claims

of the family, the tribe, or class. As Siedentop also states, this ‘freedom’ can be traced much further back in history. To stay on track, the freedom we are enquiring about is human freedom – in other words – the capacity to free oneself from a binding social contract and the classical languages might provide some clues on this issues. Although not a popular term in Europe, several humanities courses are termed ‘liberal arts’ in the USA. The ‘liberal’ in ‘liberal arts’ has the same etymological source as ‘liberalism’ which is the Latin liber which can be translated into ‘free’ (human), as opposed to a slave – in other words, the liberal arts were the ‘gentleman’s’ education which, of course, were not suited to slaves (Parker 1890, 417). Let us think of this a little through and why this is relevant to the Bronze Age: it is not unreasonable to believe that the Chalcolithic and Bronze Age marked a gradual shift from an economy based on moral trust among members of a community to an economic system that became gradually more ‘liberal’ – and this, in turn, allowed some social members to free themselves from the community. So what we see in the Bronze Age might be the inception of the individual from a social point-ofview. In terms of value, Bronze Age trade did not only commoditize a series of objects, it also commoditized or singularized the human. As Kopytoff points out, commoditization and singularization are not end points but rather processes in different directions (1986, 72–73) – and this is how we should understand the Bronze Age – as an economic process in which objects and humans become either commoditized or singularized. It is possible that we start seeing societies placing economic value on human lives for the first time in history in the Bronze Age. It is only within this context of economic transformation that ideas concerning hierarchies and elites start making sense: being part of an elite, or higher in a social hierarchy cannot rely solely on what a person owns, it must also depend on who the person is. By being part of a spectrum in which a human can become either more commodified or more singularized, the social member gains an economic identity.


It is this process that we see in the middle Bronze Age of Southern Alentejo – a process which sees the social member obtain an intrinsic value which translates into individual funerary contexts. This new institution of meaning is one that must also have existed in the El Argar region – an area that was economically connected to Southern Alentejo: the hypogeum type funerary structure is also present in El Argar, although it is secondary to burial within the settlement (Aranda Jiménez/ Montón-Subías/Sánchez Romero 2015, 120); like in Southern Alentejo, the burials found in sites of El Argar also contain meat offerings (Alves 2010; Aranda Jiménez/Esquivel Guerrero 2006; Sánchez Romero/Aranda Jiménez/Alarcón García 2007); and there are pottery styles which are common in the grave goods of both Southern Alentejo and El Argar (Filipe et al. 2013). Given this connection of the two regions, the societies living in these areas must have had the same institutions of meaning with regards to economy because it is only the presence of these common meanings that allows trade between these areas to have occurred. Trade is a big part of the process because without systematic trade – there would have been no reason to replace the communal ‘debt’ form of subsistence economy. By engaging in trade, different polities would have to start recognizing the impersonal value of objects – a

shared institution of meaning. These objects can also involve personal meanings or meanings that are culturally specific (Hahn/Weiss 2013) but to understand trade – one must recognize the impersonal value these objects had. It could be objected that the El Argar was a region that considerably more ‘rich’ than Southern Alentejo during the Bronze Age given the monumentality of the sites and the wealth of material found in the burials (Lull/ Estévez 1986), however, this does not mean that these two regions did not have a common set of institutions of meaning. Regardless of the perceived richness – El Argar and Southern Alentejo were part of the same economic system – in the same way that Hamburg and Kiel are also part of the same economic system regardless of their size and perceived wealth. In all of this, the individual in the Bronze Age starts standing out – and becoming part of the economic system itself. I have only scraped the surface with regards to the Bronze Age of Southern Alentejo and what we can learn from the sites of Outeiro Alto 2 and Torre Velha 3. As of now, these ideas remain only a hypothesis and only further research will tell if these ideas have any viability. Furthermore, it would also be necessary to see if these economic trends are witnessed elsewhere in Europe, research which I hope to conduct in the near future.

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11 arc h a eo logy a n d t h e ory – f u t ur e pat h s

11.1. Collapsing theoretical divides and rebuilding them anew Now that an archaeology based on historical understanding has been systematically defended, some final thoughts on archaeological theory and practice must be considered. First of all, this thesis is not a radical appeal towards historical understanding. If anything, this thesis is first and foremost an explanation as to how archaeology can effectively combine a historical understanding of the past with other modes of description. As has been repeated often in this thesis, not only is it entirely possible to combine the teleological and narrative mode of description with the causal mode, it is very desireable to do so. The rise of a new age in scientific archaeology (Kristiansen 2014) allied to a return of big data and ambitious archaeological challenges (Kintigh et al. 2014) shows the malleability of archaeology, as a discipline, in adapting to new political, economic, and social trends. However, it seems that underlying these trends is a desire to place history, in particular, and the human siences in general, in a more passive position (Sørensen 2017). In these trends, it is possible to see the shadow of methodological monism, and that is something we must avoid at all costs. Part of the reason why methodological monism is attractive to archaeologists comes from the misguided view that explanations of the past which are based on causal description are incommensurable with teleological and narrative understandings. As was argued in chapter 6, the archaeology of recent years established human action and consequentely, cultural change, as either driven by external

factors or motivated by human agency (Stanton 2004) but never both at the same time. When faced with this theoretical divide (Cochrane/Gardner 2011; Kristiansen 2004; Moro Abadía 2017), there is an unconscious tendency to lean towards one or the other side of the divide, and in the last years, many have started leaning towards the side which perceives human action as conditioned by external factors. Favouring external factors in explaining human action is not inherently wrong. What is wrong is the following: 1) assuming that the identification of factors external to the human is the only way to explain human action and cultural change 2) and assuming that human agency can be understood through the identification of external factors alone. Now, those who favour agency have also been misguided – in itself, agency as it stands cannot explain human action or cultural change. More importantly, the idea that agency can counteract causal-deterministic explanations of human behaviour is not entirely true, as was explained in chapter 6. In this thesis, perhaps more important than the historical understanding, is the idea that human action is neither externally compelled nor internally motivated – but rather both at the same time. When putting on a thick coat because the temperature outside has fallen it can be claimed that this action is simultaneously causal and teleological. Perceiving things under this light does not solve the age old conumdrum of whether archaeology aligns more with the natural science or with the human sciences – it does not necessarily “bridge” the theoretical divide that so many archaeologists have written extensively about. It does, however, reframe the theoretical divide and sees it as what it actually is, the archaeological tendency towards methodolog-

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ical pluralism. The aim of coming years is to make sure that methodological pluralism remains the status quo, and in addition, parse the concepts of causality and teleology, and develop archaeological practices which employ causal, teleological, and narrative modes of description – something that can be easily accomplished via interdisciplinary habits. Given that the arguments put forth in this thesis were very critical of general theories of human behaviour, it might seem that this thesis commends limiting how archaeology is practiced. This could not be further away from the truth: the rejection of general theories in archaeology expands possibilities in archaeology as it would allow a richer and more nuanced understanding of the past. Whereas general theories reduce human variability to a set of universal premises, a historical understanding uncovers this variability. Furthermore, a historical understanding of the archaeological past is open to interpretation – it does not necessarily have to conform to explicit methods, techniques, and models – it can be engaged with, in practice, in a wide variety of ways. As chapters 9 and 10 demonstrate, understanding Roman magical practices and Bronze Age funerary practices under a historical light cannot proceed in the same way and requires different ways of reasoning, different skills, and different attitudes towards data – that is to say, with methodological pluralism in mind.

11.2. towards archaeo -

logical theory and philosophy of archaeology

of the past. But parallel to this, there were some ulterior aims, perhaps less explicit but nevertheless bear mentioning. The last years have seen a gradual and modest rise of archaeological theory in Germany-based archaeologists (Hofmann/Stockhammer 2017), and it seems relevant, considering current trends towards more explicitly scientific forms of practicing archaeology, that archaeological theorists take the mantle of overseeing this trend. This is not an appeal towards gatekeeping, that is, towards purely critical attitudes of how empirically driven archaeologists conduct their work. Rather, it is an appeal to archaeological theorists to work alongside less theoretically driven archaeologists. Moreover, it is also an appeal to German archaeology departments to open their doors to the possibility of a distinct German based archaeological theory, one that is competitive and appealing to those within and without Germany. As has been pointed out by Kerstin Hofmann and Philip Stockhammer, exclusively theoretical theses have hindered rather than promoted the careers of archaeologists in Germany (2017, 5) and compelled many archaeologists with inclinations towards theory to leave the country in search of greener “theoretical” pastures (2017, footnote 3). This attitude towards theory needs to see a reversal – as it is, I believe, theory that can launch German archaeology towards a better and brighter future. Finally, another aim of this thesis is to demonstrate the viability of a philosophy of archaeology, or should I say, a philosophically informed archaeology. It is not just that German archaeology can improve with theory, theory itself needs considerable refurbishment, preferably, with the help of philosophy.

Ultimately, this thesis had multiple aims, the most important of which is the possibility and desireability of a historical understanding ....................................................................................

12 s u m ma ry / z u s a mm e n fa ss u n g

12.1. archaeology and the historical understanding The relationship of archaeology and history has always been a complex one. At its most basic, archaeology is connected to history via historical archaeology, an archaeology dedicated exclusively to the study of civilizations with written texts, especially after the 15th century (Deetz 1977). Archaeology is also connected to history via the use of methods deriving from history, demonstrated by the use of methods deriving from the Annales School of history (Bintliff 1991; Hodder 1987). Finally, archaeology is connected to history by perceiving the past through a historical lens and it is on this front that history has been most neglected in archaeology. Although there are archaeologists who have argued for a practice that is more aware of the importance of history (e.g. Barrett 1994; Morris 2000; Pauketat 2001), few have actually been able to explain why history is important to archaeology. There are several reasons why history is important but it remains nevertheless underappreciated in archaeology and this is due to the reliance of archaeology on general theories which archaeologists believe to be of greater explanatory value than historical explanations. This was particularly evident among processual archaeologists who argued that archaeology had to be anthropological and not historical (Binford 1967, Clarke 1978, 11). In later years, postprocessual archaeologists brought forth several new ideas into archaeology, some of which were congenial with history. However, postprocessual archaeology remained nevertheless too focused on the study of the past as static bubbles frozen

in time and even though postprocessual archaeology was more open to history, it remained undervalued. The purpose of this thesis is to answer the question “why is history important to archaeology?” and consequently explain not only why it is important but absolutely essential. Central to understanding why history is important to archaeology is recognizing what type of science archaeology purports to be. If archaeology purports to be a social science, we must, once again, consider how the social sciences and the empirical sciences differ. Concerning this issue, I propose a trichotomy that sees the sciences divided into the empirical, social, and historical, and three associated modes of description: the causal, the teleological, and the narrative. Furthermore, in order to recognize what constitutes a society it is crucial that we understand what social institutions are and how these are indeterminate (Castoriadis 1984, 1987). Given that social institutions are indeterminate, the application of the causal mode to explain social processes is very limited since the causal mode works exclusively with determinate objects, as demonstrated by Carl Menger in his pioneering work (1985 [1883]). The reason why the causal mode fails to capture indeterminateness is because causation explains through reduction, i.e. by identifying all the objects in a phenomenon and establishing relations of cause and effect between them (e.g. cup, books, Margaret Thatcher, brain). Unlike the causal mode, the teleological and narrative mode operate by reaching an understanding of how all determinate elements interact in a holistic context (Taylor 1964). It is the context itself that provides the understanding and not the individual elements within the context.

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With these ideas in mind, it becomes clear why the causal mode of explanation employed in archaeology has failed to produce coherent and concise model of social explanation (Webmoor/Witmore 2008). From a holistic perspective, it is important to recognize that teleological actions depend not only on the subject of an action but also the object of the action – also known as intentional object (Brentano 2015 [1874], Husserl 2014 [1913]). For instance, the desire to attend the World Cup depends not only on the human who wishes to go to the World Cup but also on the existence of the World Cup as an object which is external to the desire. This means that to desire something requires having something in the real world which one can desire. Against this perspective, agency theory in archaeology is based on the belief that the desire to act comes not from an external object but from an internal process within the subject. For the proponents of agency theory, agency is an inherent capacity of humans to be “free to choose otherwise” (Chisholm 1976). As Nigel Pleasants has argued, agency theory, is wholly incorrect when understood in this manner because the freedom to choose otherwise only makes sense when there is something to be free from or something to choose from (1997). This means that agency requires an external object and thus cannot be something that is inherent to the human itself. Naturally, not all archaeology needs to be focused on the social aspect of past societies and thus, archaeology can be conceived as a science that can focus on past reality in different ways. Traditionally, archaeological discourse is commonly seen as either abstract or empirical (sensu Smith 2011) but I suggest moving away from this unhelpful dichotomy and perceiving archaeological discourse as focused on individual, plural, social, and abstract objects. Individual and plural objects are those that can be employed in explanations requiring quantitative models and the causal mode of explanation; whereas social objects are those that are unquantifiable and require the teleological and narrative mode of explanation; finally, abstract objects are those that have no bearing on the empirical world and serve the purpose of combining different types

of discourse under a single umbrella term (Moore 2004). To understand social objects one must ask why something is social in the first place – and the answer is because a social object has something that provides it with understanding – in other words, an institution of meaning (Descombes 2014). The concept of institution of meaning combines the Wittgensteinian notion of rule-following (Wittgenstein 2006 [1953]) and the notion of ‘meaning’. Unlike Hodder’s hermeneutic approach (1991, 1992, 1999) which also focused on meanings but ignored the notion of rule-following, institutions of meaning follows the idea that society must be based on a series of institutionalized rules without which people could not be able to connect with one another. This departs from other models of meaning as it is posited on the idea that meaning is eminently social. For instance, Hodder defended the idea that the meaning of an object could only be understood by perceiving a sign in relation to a social contextual whole from where it derives its meaning (Yates 2000) – this is known in philosophy as ‘semantic holism’. This view was criticized in philosophy by Jerry Fodor and Ernest Lepore who argued that if a sign is only understandable in a holistic context, then it would be impossible to understand the signs of foreign societies since they exist in a context that is very different from our own (1992). Thus, instead of semantic holism, Fodor and Lepore suggest a ‘semantic atomist’ view given that this view allows for signs and their meanings to exist in isolation. Furthermore, the semantic atomist view allows for the interaction of people originating from different social contexts. However, as pointed out by Vincent Descombes (2014), both semantic holism and atomism are incorrect because meaning originates from what rules have been established among social members. For example, to understand what ‘cat owner’ means does not require understanding what it means in the context of all the meanings in society (semantic holism) nor understanding the relation of a human towards a cat (semantic atomism) but rather the understanding of a rule in which a person is an owner of a cat while the rest of the society is not (anthropological holism). Thus,

12 SUMMARY/Zusammenfassung

to understand what a cat owner is requires also recognizing the social and juridical concept of ‘private property’ with regards to the ownership of cats. While for Hodder, the meaning of objects could be completely arbitrary and subjective, the institutions of meaning are objective in that they must be accepted as something objective and common to all members of a given society. With these ideas in mind, archaeologists must now reconsider some of their most basic assumptions. One of these assumptions concerns individuals and generalization – as Hodder has argued, the notion of human “individual” is one that is socially and historically constructed (Hodder 2007) and not an ontological certainty – a human individual is also an institution of meaning. Therefore, against Giddens (1984), the development of societies cannot be perceived as a dialectic involving individual agents and social structures. By assuming that all societies develop through this dialectic, archaeologists such as John Barrett (1994) and Matthew Johnson (2000) are positing societies on anthropological universals. What does this mean? Well, if social behaviour can be explained by a set of anthropological universals, then there is no need to provide explanations that are particular to specific cultural groups. Any and every society can be explained by appealing to a single form of explanation. However, if we accept that meanings are socially constructed and exclusive to specific cultural groups, it derives that each of these cultural groups requires recognizing an understanding that is unique to them. As argued earlier, social action is action that is directed towards objects that are outside of the actor and as such these actions cannot be justified by appealing to anthropological universals which are common to all cultural groups. The question we must ask ourselves is “how can we understand social action without relying on anthropological universals?” The only way is through history. As Michael Oakeshott (2015 [1933]) and Louis Mink (1970) have defended, history is a way of understanding the world that is unique, i.e. history cannot be universalized. Vincent Descombes has an interesting thought-experiment that illustrates this idea:

imagine a cro-magnon man, who is walking across some fields, is suddenly struck by lighting and the electrical discharge alters is neuronal state to that of a person who thinks he wants to go to a bank (2001, 228). How does the cro-magnon man recognize this thought? What does the bank mean to him? What this thought-experiment illustrates is that the thought of wanting to go a bank requires understanding the historical context in which a person would want to go to a bank – a context in which banks and all the practices associated to them have developed in the world. To understand why a person would want to go a bank requires recognizing what Descombes calls ‘narrative intelligibility’: a particular past must have taken place and a particular future must be conceivable (Descombes 2001, xviii). W. B. Gallie likens this principle to the idea that understanding a society is like understanding how a game can be played (1964), i.e. to understand why social actors act in the way they do is to understand the rules to which they are bound. These ideas lead us to some conclusions with regards to archaeological practice. If the aim of archaeology is to understand humans in the capacity of social actors, then the current practice of upholding a general theory and exemplifying the theory through individual case-studies (see Johnson 2006) is not tenable. Concomitantly, the idea that the archaeological record is a reflection of social practices (Patrik 1985) also requires reassessment. As an alternative, I suggest perceiving the archaeological record as evidence which must then be interpreted not as a reflection of social practices but as traces of past actions. The reason why this is preferable is because by conceiving the record as social practices is to reduce archaeology to the study of what behaviours were statistically likely in the past. In a way, there is nothing inherently wrong in statistically inferring how people behaved in the past however, statistical studies do have several limitations. For example, Carlo Ginzburg’s study of inquisitional records in Northern Italy has shown that there was a miller called Menocchio who went against the Church by supporting his own version of the creation of the universe (2013 [1980]). Statistically, the

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life of someone like Menocchio would have to be ignored given that he is an exceptional case. Thus, archaeology requires methods which allow us to conceive the past not only based on what was statistically prone to happen but also what could have possibly happened. If these ideas are acceptable, we must also accept that certain topics in archaeology have been addressed in an incorrect manner. For instance, social institutions such as religion and magic require reassessment. The relationship of religion and magic has always been a troubled one in anthropology (Versnel 1991), partly because religion and magic have been conceived in a general and abstract manner. To understand the relation of religion and magic there are two things that need to be taken into account: first, it is necessary to realize that the practice of religious and/or magical rituals do not come from beliefs (sensu Arponen/Ribeiro 2014) and second, that there is no universal cause as to why people have religious practices. The issue is that identifying a belief or identifying a universal cause does not actually provide an explanation as to why a specific cultural group acted in the way they did in the past. For instance, stating that people go to Church because they believe in God does not answer where and why that belief exists in the first place. If we apply this reasoning to magical rituals, we come to the conclusion that magic can be understood if we take into account the historical background in which it arose. For example, the Greeks and Romans practiced magical rituals and in their specific case the concept of magic comes specifically from their interactions with the Persian religion Zoroastrianism (Bremmer 1999). It is was due to the interaction between Persian priests and Greek religion that the concept of magic arose. Another topic of interest is that of identity and economy in European Bronze Age. One of the central problems in the study of economy in anthropology and archaeology is that concepts and practices associated to market economies are oftentimes imposed onto societies which did not practice a market economy (Sahlins 1972). Ian Hodder criticized this practice and opted for ignoring economic practices in favour of understanding the ideology of societies in prehistoric Europe (1984).

Hodder was correct in turning to ideology however he was incorrect in assuming that economy and ideology were two different spheres of interaction. To understand social actors during the European Bronze Age it is necessary to collapse economy and ideology into a single element of analysis – and by doing this we come to the conclusion of the importance of ‘value’ of both people and objects and how this shaped the rise of new economic practices at the time.

12.2. zusammenfassung :

archäologie und historisches verständnis

Das Verhältnis zwischen Archäologie und Geschichte ist schon immer komplex gewesen. Auf einer grundlegenden Ebene ist Archäologie mit der Geschichte durch historische Archäologie verbunden, eine Teildisziplin, die sich exklusiv der Erforschung von Zivilisationen anhand geschriebener Texte widmet, insbesondere solcher, die nach dem 15. Jahrhundert verfasst wurden (Deetz 1977). Mit der Geschichte ist die Archäologie auch durch von der Geschichtsforschung abgeleitete Methoden verbunden, veranschaulicht durch den Einsatz von Methoden, die von der Annales-Schule abgeleitet sind (Bintliff 1991; Hodder 1987). Schließlich ist Archäologie mit der Geschichte verknüpft, da sie die Vergangenheit durch eine historische Linse wahrnimmt, wobei auf dieser Front wurde die Geschichte am meisten in der Archäologie vernachlässigt. Obwohl einige Archäologen für eine Praxis argumentieren, die einen bewussteren Umgang mit der Bedeutung von Geschichte hat (z.B. Barrett 1994; Morris 2000; Pauketat 2001), konnten bisher wenige tatsächlich erklären, warum Geschichte für die Archäologie wichtig ist. Es gibt mehrere Gründe, warum Geschichte von Bedeutung ist. Dennoch bleibt sie in der Archäologie unterschätzt, weil letztere sich auf einige allgemeine Theorien stützt, welchen Archäologen einen höheren Erklärungswert als historischen Erklärungen beimessen. Dies ist


besonders bei prozessualen Archäologen deutlich, die argumentierten, dass Archäologie anthropologisch und nicht historisch fundiert sein soll (Binford 1967; Clarke 1978, 11). In späteren Jahren, führten postprozessuale Archäologen einige neue Ideen in der Archäologie ein, wovon manche mit Geschichte kongenial waren. Trotzdem blieb postprozessuale Archäologie zu fixiert auf eine Analyse der Vergangenheit als statische Blasen gefroren in der Zeit. Obwohl postprozessuale Archäologie der Geschichte gegenüber offener war, blieb Geschichte unterbewertet. Das Ziel dieser Arbeit ist es, die Frage zu beantworten, warum Geschichte für die Archäologie wichtig ist und dabei nicht nur zu erklären, warum sie wichtig, sondern auch unbedingt erforderlich ist. Zentral für ein Verständnis, warum Geschichte für die Archäologie essentiell ist, ist eine Erkenntnis darüber, welche Art von Wissenschaft die Archäologie vorgibt zu sein. Wenn Archäologie behauptet, eine Sozialwissenschaft zu sein, müssen wir erneut überlegen, wie sich die Sozialwissenschaften von den empirischen Wissenschaften unterscheiden. In Bezug auf diese Frage schlage ich eine Trichotomie vor, welche die Wissenschaften in empirische, soziale und historische Aspekte gliedert und ferner in noch drei entsprechenden Arten der Beschreibung unterteilt: die kausale, die teleologische und die narrative. Darüber hinaus ist es entscheidend, dass wir verstehen, was soziale Institutionen kennzeichnen und wie diese unbestimmt sind (Castoriadis 1984, 1987), um zu erkennen, was eine Gesellschaft ausmacht. Wenn soziale Institutionen unbestimmt sind, ist die Anwendung des kausalen Modus, um soziale Prozesse zu erklären, sehr eingeschränkt, angesichts der Tatsache, dass der kausale Modus ausschließlich mit bestimmten Objekten funktioniert, wie von Carl Menger in seiner Pionierarbeit (1985 [1883]) demonstriert. Der Grund, warum es dem kausalen Modus nicht gelingt Unbestimmtheit zu erfassen, ist, dass Kausalität sich durch Reduktion erklärt, d.h. durch die Identifizierung aller Objekte eines Phänomens und die Bestimmung der Beziehungen von Ursache und Wirkung zwischen ihnen (zum Beispiel Becher, Bücher, Margaret Thatcher, Gehirn). Im Gegensatz zum kausalen Modus

funktionieren der teleologische und der narrative Modus, indem sie ein Verständnis dafür gewinnen, wie alle festgelegten Elemente in einem ganzheitlichen Kontext (Taylor 1964) in Wechselwirkung treten. Es ist der Kontext selbst, der das Verständnis stellt und nicht die einzelnen Elemente im Kontext. Vor dem Hintergrund dieser Ideen wird es deutlich, warum es die kausale Erklärungsweise in der Archäologie nicht geschafft hat, kohärente und prägnante Modelle der sozialen Erklärung zu produzieren (Webmoor/ Witmore 2008). Aus ganzheitlicher Sicht ist es wichtig zu erkennen, dass teleologische Aktionen sowohl vom Subjekt als auch vom Ziel einer Aktion abhängen – auch als intentionales Objekt bekannt (Brentano 2015 [1874], Husserl 2014 [1913]). Zum Beispiel hängt der Wunsch, die WM zu besuchen, nicht nur von dem Menschen ab, der auf die WM gehen möchten, sondern auch von der Existenz der Weltmeisterschaft als Objekt, welches dem Wunsch extern ist. Dies bedeutet, dass das Begehren einer Sache zunächst deren Existenz in der Realität voraussetzt. Im Gegensatz zu dieser Perspektive basiert die Agency-Theorie in der Archäologie auf dem Glauben, dass der Wunsch zu handeln nicht von einem externen Objekt, sondern von einem internen Prozess innerhalb des Subjekts kommt. Für die Befürworter der Agency-Theorie ist Agency eine inhärente Fähigkeit des Menschen „frei zu sein, anders zu entscheiden“ (Chisholm 1976). Wie Nigel Pleasants (1997) argumentiert hat, ist Agency-Theorie völlig falsch, wenn es auf diese Weise verstanden wird, weil die Freiheit anders zu entscheiden nur dann Sinn macht, wenn es etwas gibt, wovon man frei sein kann, oder etwas gibt, das zur Auswahl steht. Dies bedeutet, dass agency ein externes Objekt erfordert und somit nicht etwas sein kann, das dem Menschen selbst inhärent ist. Natürlich muss nicht die gesamte Archäologie auf den sozialen Aspekt der Vergangenheit fokussiert sein und daher kann die Archäologie als eine Wissenschaft begriffen werden, die sich auf die vergangene Wirklichkeit auf unterschiedliche Weise konzentrieren kann. Traditionell wird der archäologische Diskurs allgemein entweder als abstrakt oder empirisch verstanden (sensu Smith 2011).

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Aber ich schlage vor, nicht weiter an dieser nicht hilfreichen Dichotomie festzuhalten. Stattdessen soll man den archäologischen Diskurs als ein Phänomen begreifen, das sich auf individuelle, mehrfache, soziale und abstrakte Objekte fokussiert. Individuelle und plurale Objekte sind diejenigen Objekte, die in Erklärungen genutzt werden können, welche quantitativer Modelle und dem kausalen Erklärungsmodus bedürfen. Dagegen sind soziale Objekte diejenigen, die nicht quantifizierbar sind und einen teleologischen und narrativen Erklärungsmodus erfordern. Schließlich sind abstrakte Objekte diejenigen, die keinen Einfluss auf die empirische Welt haben und dazu dienen, verschiedene Arten des Diskurses unter einem Oberbegriff (Moore 2004) zu kombinieren. Um soziale Objekte zu verstehen, muss man sich fragen, warum etwas in erster Linie sozial ist. Die Antwort darauf: weil ein soziales Objekt etwas hat, das es mit Verständnis versorgt – mit anderen Worten eine Institution der Bedeutung (Descombes 2014). Das Konzept der Institution der Bedeutung kombiniert den Wittgensteinischen Begriff der Regelbefolgung (Wittgenstein 2006 [1953]) und den Begriff der „Bedeutung“. Im Gegensatz zu Hodder’s hermeneutischem Ansatz (1991, 1992, 1999), der sich auch auf Bedeutung konzentriert, aber den Begriff der Regelbefolgung ignoriert, folgen Institutionen von Bedeutung dem Konzept, dass die Gesellschaft auf einer Reihe von institutionalisierten Regeln beruhen muss, ohne die die Menschen nicht dazu fähig wären, sich miteinander zu verbinden. Dieses Konzept weicht von anderen Modellen von Bedeutung ab, weil es auf der Idee basiert, dass Bedeutung eminent sozial ist. Zum Beispiel verteidigte Hodder die Idee, dass die Bedeutung eines Objekts nur durch die Wahrnehmung eines Zeichens in Bezug auf einen ganzheitlichen sozialen Kontext verstanden werden konnte, von dem das Zeichen seine Bedeutung ableitet (Yates 2000). Diese Ansicht ist in der Philosophie als „semantischer Holismus“ bekannt. Diese Auffassung wurde in der Philosophie durch Jerry Fodor und Ernest Lepore kritisiert, die wie folgt argumentierten: Wenn ein Zeichen nur in einem holistischen Kontext verständlich wäre, dann wäre es unmöglich, die Zeichen einer fremden Gesell-

schaft zu verstehen, da diese einen Kontext zur Grundlage haben, der sich sehr von unserem Kontext unterscheidet (1992). Anstelle des semantischen Holismus haben Fodor und Lepore deshalb die Sichtweise des „Semantischen Atomismus“ vorgeschlagen, da diese Ansicht erlaubt, Zeichen und deren Bedeutungen in Isolation zu betrachten. Darüber hinaus ermöglicht die Sichtweise des „Sematischen Atomismus“ die Interaktion von Menschen aus unterschiedlichen sozialen Kontexten. Wie Vincent Descombes (2014) jedoch gezeigt hat, sind sowohl semantischer Holismus als auch und Atomismus nicht haltbar angesichts der Tatsache, dass Bedeutung nur von Regeln abgeleitet werden können, die durch Mitglieder einer sozialen Gruppe festgelegt wurden. Beispielsweise bedarf das Verständnis der Bedeutung eines „Katzeneigentümers“ weder eines Verständnisses dessen Bedeutung im Kontext aller Bedeutungen in einer Gesellschaft (Semantischer Holismus) oder eines Verständnisses der Beziehung zwischen einem Menschen und einer Katze (Semantischer Atomismus), sondern eines Verständnisses einer Regel, welche besagt, dass nur eine Person Besitzer der Katze ist und der Rest der Gesellschaft nicht (Anthropologischer Holismus). Um zu verstehen was ein Katzeneigentümer ist, ist folglich auch eine Erkenntnis über das soziale und juristische Konzept des ‚Privateigentums‘ in Bezug auf den Besitz von Katzen erforderlich. Während nach Hodder die Bedeutung von Objekten völlig willkürlich und subjektiv sein könnte, sind die Institutionen von Bedeutung objektiv, insofern als diese als etwas objektives und gemeinsames für alle Mitglieder einer Gesellschaft akzeptiert werden müssen. Mit diesen Ideen im Kopf, müssen Archäologen einige ihrer grundlegenden Annahmen überdenken. Eine dieser Annahmen betrifft Einzelpersonen und Verallgemeinerungen. Wie Hodder (2007) argumentierte, ist der Begriff des menschlichen „Individuums“ sozial und historisch konstruiert und nicht eine ontologische Gewissheit. Ein menschliches Individuum ist auch eine Institution von Bedeutung. Entgegen Giddens (1984) Auffassung, kann die Entwicklung von Gesellschaften daher nicht als eine Dialektik, die individuelle


Agenten und sozialen Strukturen involviert, wahrgenommen werden. Unter der Annahme, dass sich alle Gesellschaften durch diese Dialektik entwickeln, postulieren John Barrett (1994) und Matthew Johnson (2000) Gesellschaften, die auf anthropologischen Universalien basieren. Was bedeutet dies? Nun, wenn soziales Verhalten durch eine Reihe von anthropologischen Universalien erklärt werden kann, dann gibt es keine Notwendigkeit, Erklärungen zu liefern, die sich an bestimmte kulturelle Gruppen richten. Jeder und jede Gesellschaft kann unter Berufung auf eine einzige Form der Erklärung erläutert werden. Wenn wir akzeptieren, dass Bedeutungen sozial konstruiert und exklusiv für bestimmte kulturelle Gruppen sind, ergibt sich allerdings, dass jede dieser kulturellen Gruppen ein eigenes, einzigartiges Verständnis benötigt. Wie bereits argumentiert, soziales Verhalten ist ein Verhalten, das auf Objekte gerichtet ist, die sich außerhalb des Akteurs befinden und als solche können diese Aktionen nicht unter Berufung auf anthropologische Universalien gerechtfertigt sein, die für alle kulturellen Gruppen gemeinsam sind. Die Frage, die wir uns stellen müssen, ist „Wie können wir soziales Verhalten verstehen ohne uns auf anthropologische Universalien zu stützen?“ Der einzige Weg ist durch die Geschichte. Wie Michael Oakeshott (2015 [1933]) und Louis Mink (1970) verteidigt haben, ist die Geschichte ein einzigartiger Weg, die Welt zu verstehen, d.h. die Geschichte kann nicht verallgemeinert werden. Vincent Descombes (2001, 228) macht ein interessantes Gedankenexperiment, das diese Idee aufzeigt: man stelle sich ein Cro-Magnon-Menschen vor, der über einige Felder geht und von Blitz getroffen wird. Die elektrische Entladung verändert seinen neuronalen derart, dass er denkt, er wollte zu einer Bank gehen. Wie erkennt dieser Cro-MagnonMensch diesen Gedanken? Was bedeutet die Bank für ihn? Was dieses Gedankenexperiment zeigt, ist, dass der Gedanke „zu einer Bank zu gehen“ ein Verständnis für den historischen Kontext erfordert – einen Kontext, in dem Banken und alle Praktiken, die damit verbunden sind, sich bereits in der Welt entwickelt haben.

Um zu verstehen, warum eine Person eine Bank aufsuchen wollte, muss man erkennen, was Descombes „narrative Intelligibilität“ nennt: eine bestimmte Vergangenheit muss stattgefunden haben und eine bestimmte Zukunft muss denkbar sein (Descombes 2001, xviii). W.B. Gallie (1964) vergleicht dieses Prinzip mit der Idee, dass das Verstehen einer Gesellschaft vergleichbar mit dem Verstehen eines Spieles ist. D.h. zu verstehen, warum soziale Akteure in der Art und Weise handeln, wie sie es tun, ist die Regeln zu begreifen, an die sie gebunden sind. Diese Ideen führen uns zu einigen Schlussfolgerungen in Bezug auf die archäologische Praxis. Wenn es das Ziel der Archäologie ist, Menschen in ihrer Kapazität als soziale Akteure zu verstehen, dann ist die derzeitige Praxis, eine allgemeine Theorie aufrechtzuerhalten und diese Theorie durch individuelle Fallstudien (cf. Johnson 2006) zu veranschaulichen, nicht haltbar. Damit einhergehend muss die Idee, dass archäologische Aufzeichnungen ein Spiegelbild von sozialen Praktiken sind, eine Neubewertung erfahren (Patrik 1985). Als eine Alternative schlage ich vor, dass archäologische Aufzeichnungen als Belege wahrgenommen werden, die nicht als ein Spiegelbild von sozialen Praktiken interpretiert werden sollen, sondern als Spuren von vergangenen Aktionen. Der Grund, warum dies vorzuziehen ist, liegt darin, dass man sonst archäologische Aufzeichnungen auf die Erforschung von sozialen Praktiken, die in der Vergangenheit statistisch wahrscheinlich waren, reduzieren würde. In gewisser Weise ist grundsätzlich nichts falsch mit einer statistischen Folgerung über das Verhalten von Menschen in der Vergangenheit, jedoch haben statistische Studien einige Einschränkungen. Zum Beispiel hat Carlo Ginzburg’s (2013 [1980]) Studie über inquisitorische Aufzeichnungen in Norditalien gezeigt, dass es einen Müller namens Menoccio gab, der gegen die Kirche vorging, indem er seine eigene Version der Schöpfung des Universums predigte. Statistisch gesehen, müsste das Leben von jemandem wie Menocchio ignoriert werden, da er ein Ausnahmefall ist. Daher benötigt die Archäologie Verfahren, die es uns erlauben, nicht nur das, was statistisch wahrscheinlich war, zu

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erfassen, sondern auch das, was möglicherweise hätte passieren können. Wenn diese Ideen annehmbar sind, müssen wir auch akzeptieren, dass bestimmte Themen in der Archäologie in einer falschen Art und Weise angegangen worden sind. Beispielsweise bedürfen soziale Institutionen wie Religion und Magie eine Neubewertung. Das Verhältnis von Religion und Magie wurde in der Anthropologie stets als ein problematisches erachtet (Versnel 1991), da Religion und Magie zum Teil in einer allgemeinen und abstrakten Weise betrachtet wurden. Um die Beziehung zwischen Religion und Magie zu verstehen, gibt es zweierlei zu berücksichtigen. Erstens ist es notwendig zu erkennen, dass die Praxis von religiösen und/oder magischen Ritualen nicht vom Glauben herrührt (sensu Arponen/Ribeiro 2014), und zweitens, dass es keine universelle Ursache gibt, warum Menschen religiöse Praktiken betreiben. Das Problem ist, dass die Identifizierung eines Glaubens oder einer universellen Ursache uns eigentlich keine Erklärung liefert, warum eine bestimmte kulturelle Gruppe gerade in der Art und Weise gehandelt hat, wie sie es in der Vergangenheit getan hat. So beantwortet beispielsweise die Aussage, dass Menschen in die Kirche gehen, weil sie an Gott glauben, nicht die Frage, wo und warum Glaube überhaupt existiert. Wenn wir diese Argumentation auf magische Rituale anwenden, kommen wir zu dem Schluss, dass Magie verstanden werden kann, wenn wir den historischen Hintergrund, in dem sie entstanden ist, berücksichtigen.

Das Praktizieren magischer Rituale durch die Griechen und die Römer beispielsweise rührt von ihren Interaktionen mit der persischen Religion des Zoroastrismus (Bremmer 1999) her. Wegen der Interaktionen zwischen persischen Priester und der griechischen Religion entstand das Konzept der Magie. Ein weiteres Thema von Interesse stellen Identität und Wirtschaft in der europäischen Bronzezeit dar. Eines der zentralen Probleme in der Erforschung der Wirtschaft in der Anthropologie und Archäologie ist, dass Konzepte und Praktiken, die zur Marktwirtschaft in Beziehung stehen, oftmals mit Gesellschaften in Verbindung gebracht werden, die keine Marktwirtschaft (Sahlins 1972) hatten. Ian Hodder (1984) kritisierte diese Praxis und beschloss, Wirtschaftspraktiken zu ignorieren zugunsten einer Erfassung der Ideologie der Gesellschaften im prähistorischen Europa. Hodder hatte Recht, sich der Ideologie zu widmen, war jedoch falsch in der Annahme, dass Ökonomie und Ideologie zwei verschiedene Sphären der Interaktion sind. Um ein Verständnis von sozialen Akteuren während der europäischen Bronzezeit zu gewinnen, ist es notwendig, Wirtschaft und Ideologie als ein einziges Element der Analyse zu subsumieren. Auf diese Weise können wir eine Schlussfolgerung über die Bedeutung des „Werts“ sowohl von Menschen als auch Objekten treffen und wie diese den Aufstieg neuer Wirtschaftspraktiken zu der Zeit prägten.

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Universitätsforschungen zur prähistorischen Archäologie – bisherige Publikationen aus der Graduiertenschule „Human Development in Landscapes“:

Band 1 Kiel Graduate School "Human Development in Landscapes", Workshop and Session Organizers (eds.) Landscapes and Human Development: The Contribution of European Archaeology Proceedings of the International Workshop "Socio-Environmental Dynamics over the last 12,000 Years: The Creation of Landscapes (1st–4th April 2009)" Universitätsforschungen zur prähistorischen Archäologie 191 (Bonn 2010) 307 S., zahlreiche Abbildungen ISBN 978-3-7749-3709-3 Band 2 Jutta Kneisel / Wiebke Kirleis / Marta Dal Corso / Nicole Taylor / Verena Tiedtke (eds.) Collapse or Continuity? Environment and Development of Bronze Age Human Landscapes Proceedings of the International Workshop "Socio-Environmental Dynamics over the Last 12,000 Years: The Creation of Landscapes II (14th–18th March 2011)" in Kiel, Volume 1 [Human Development in Landscapes, Graduate School at the University of Kiel] Universitätsforschungen zur prähistorischen Archäologie 205 (Bonn 2012) 279 S., zahlreiche z.T. farbige Abbildungen ISBN 978-3-7749-3763-5 Band 3 Martin Furholt / Martin Hinz / Doris Mischka (eds.) "As time goes by?" Monumentality, Landscapes and the Temporal Perspective Proceedings of the International Workshop "Socio-Environmental Dynamics over the Last 12,000 Years: The Creation of Landscapes II (14th–18th March 2011)" in Kiel, Volume 2 [Human Development in Landscapes, Graduate School at the University of Kiel] Universitätsforschungen zur prähistorischen Archäologie 206 (Bonn 2012) 263 S., zahlreiche z.T. farbige Abbildungen ISBN 978-3-7749-3764-2 Band 4 Robert Hofmann / Fevzi-Kemal Moetz / Johannes Müller (eds.) Tells: Social and Environmental Space Proceedings of the International Workshop "Socio-Environmental Dynamics over the Last 12,000 Years: The Creation of Landscapes II (14th–18th March 2011)" in Kiel, Volume 3 [Human Development in Landscapes, Graduate School at the University of Kiel] Universitätsforschungen zur prähistorischen Archäologie 207 (Bonn 2012) 233 S., zahlreiche z.T. farbige Abbildungen ISBN 978-3-7749-3765-9 Band 5 Fevzi Kemal Moetz Sesshaftwerdung – Aspekte der Niederlassung im Neolithikum in Obermesopotamien Universitätsforschungen zur prähistorischen Archäologie 244 (Bonn 2014) 327 S., zahlreiche, z. T. farbige Abbildungen, 47 Tabellen ISBN 978-3-7749-3873-1 Band 6 Jutta Kneisel / Marta Dal Corso / Wiebke Kirleis / Heiko Scholz / Nicole Taylor / Verena Tiedtke (eds.) The Third Food Revolution? Setting the Bronze Age Table: Common Trends in Economic and Subsistence Strategies in Bronze Age Europe Proceedings of the International Workshop „Socio-Environmental Dynamics over the Last 12,000 Years: The Creation of Landscapes III (15th–18th April 2013)“ in Kiel Universitätsforschungen zur prähistorischen Archäologie 283 (Bonn 2015) 288 S., zahlreiche, z. T. farbige Abbildungen ISBN 978-3-7749-4003-1

Band 7 Nicole Taylor Burning Questions – Identity and Late Bronze Age / Early Iron Age Cremation Cemeteries Universitätsforschungen zur prähistorischen Archäologie 286 (Bonn 2016) 172 S., zahlreiche Abbildungen ISBN 978-3-7749-4029-1 Band 8 Ralph Großmann Das dialektische Verhältnis von Schnurkeramik und Glockenbecher zwischen Rhein und Saale Universitätsforschungen zur prähistorischen Archäologie 287 (Bonn 2016) 280 S., zahlreiche z.T. farbige Abbildungen ISBN 978-3-7749-4035-2 Band 9 Martin Furholt, Ralph Großmann, Marzena Szmyt Transitional Landscapes? The 3rd Millennium BC in Europe Proceedings of the International Workshop „Socio-Environmental Dynamics over the Last 12,000 Years: The Creation of Landscapes III (15th–18th April 2013)“ in Kiel Universitätsforschungen zur prähistorischen Archäologie 292 (Bonn 2016) 230 S., zahlreiche z.T. farbige Abbildungen ISBN 978-3-7749-4061-1 Band 10 Monica DeCet Long-term Social Development on a Mediterranean Island: Menorca between 1600 BCE and 1900 CE Universitätsforschungen zur prähistorischen Archäologie 303 (Bonn 2017) 240 S., zahlreiche z.T. farbige Abbildungen ISBN 978-3-7749-4113-7 Band 11 Svend Hansen, Johannes Müller Rebellion and Inequality in Archaeology Proceedings of the Kiel Workshops „Archaeology of Rebellion“ (2014) and „Social Inequality as a Topic in Archaeology“ (2015) Universitätsforschungen zur prähistorischen Archäologie 308 (Bonn 2017) 332 S., zahlreiche z.T. farbige Abbildungen ISBN 978-3-7749-4132-8 Band 12 Marta Dal Corso Environmental history and development of the human landscape in a northeastern Italian lowland during the Bronze Age: a multidisciplinary case-study Universitätsforschungen zur prähistorischen Archäologie 312 (Bonn 2018) 232 S., zahlreiche z.T. farbige Abbildungen ISBN 978-3-7749-4151-9 Band 13 Stefanie Bergemann Zauschwitz (Landkreis Leipzig): Siedlungen und Gräber eines neolithischen Fundplatzes Universitätsforschungen zur prähistorischen Archäologie 314 (Bonn 2018) 440 S., zahlreiche z.T. farbige Abbildungen ISBN 978-3-7749-4155-7

Archaeology and the Historical Understanding

Archaeology and the Historical Understanding

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