What future for studying the past? by Geoff Carver

Published in Wac list 20.10.07
wac@flinders.edu.au


What future for studying the past?

Among the more obvious approaches to answering the question posed by the title of this competition might be those labeled methodological (how will archaeologists work?), academic (how will archaeologists be trained?), and professional (will archaeology be a promising career?). Although each one of these should be seen as a topic worthy of further discussion on its own, the following paper intends to show that solutions to some of the fundamental problems facing archaeology would best be resolved by taking a more holistic stance, one which combines aspects of these and other related approaches.
Partly as a result of past failures to take such a stance (and thereby reconcile any number of contradictions in method and theory), archaeology is a discipline facing crisis. The following will assess where we are – the state of the art – examine how we got here, and close by forwarding “a modest proposal” as potential solution.

Crisis? What crisis?

It might well be argued that archaeology has always faced crises in one form or another; that it has continued to prove the doomsayers wrong is merely a reflection of the groundless hyperbole used in much archaeological (primarily theoretical) debate.
The crisis discussed in the following is, however, somewhat more existential. As a result of processes seemingly beyond our control, we are currently witnessing a major reevaluation of archaeology’s place within society; a reevaluation potentially as profound as those related to the discipline’s transformation from antiquarianism during the 19th century, and the move away from an almost exclusively academic pursuit towards a public/professional archaeology after the Second World War.
We need to recognize – and come to terms with – the fact that archaeology is not necessary. While we – its practitioners – might not like to think of ourselves as being expendable, much of the rest of the world could probably go on quite nicely without us. In fact, in an age of global warming, overpopulation, school and hospital closures resulting from government cutbacks, etc., our concerns might appear to be quite trivial.
Many archaeologists could respond by arguing that there is some intrinsic human need to know about our past and origins (if only in the limited sense implied by Santayana’s famous adage), or repeat the platitudes regarding “quality of life issues” which have been circulating at least since the signing of the Athens Charter for the Restoration of Historic Monuments in 1931.
Whatever our own opinion on the matter might be, however, we seem to be fighting a losing battle; under-funded university departments and rescue projects are but two obvious examples. Others include archaeologists’ poor career prospects and the contrast between public support for ecological/environmental concerns and heritage protection.
That is not to say that we have not – at least in some cases – managed to excite public imagination. Our discoveries win high ratings for the Time Team and Discovery Channel when we prize them out of our dusty museums and lofty towers of academia. But that interest has yet to manifest itself into political action of the type which might save archaeology.

How did we get here?

There are any number of causes for this sorry state, only a few of which are specific to archaeology and not common to contemporary society as a whole. Although predicting the future of archaeology ultimately involves making predictions about wider trends within society (since the overriding paradigms within which archaeological investigation occurs reflect the spirit of the times), this latter task leads away from archaeology, and beyond the scope of the present discussion. Future trends in post-modernist discourse, globalization, etc., will also not be discussed here as they are essentially unknowable.
It should be safe to hazard a guess, however, that present economic and/or political pressures on archaeology will – at least over the short-term – continue or increase.
Thus we face the two-headed dragon of under-funding and a geopolitical system which values economic development over the preservation of cultural heritage, a combination which threatens the future of archaeology.
Although other aspects of the research/rescue debate will be discussed below, it should be noted that the purest academic research is no more sheltered from economic and political fortunes than is rescue work. The utterly dismal theorem foresees standards falling in response to pressure for reduced costs. Market forces will cause archaeological projects to rely ever-increasingly upon unskilled labor, ever-tighter schedules, equipment shortages, etc., and archaeologists’ acceptance of such cost-cutting measures will in turn help perpetuate the downward spiral.
The long-term effects of this process should be obvious. The short term will bring hardship not only to individual archaeologists and their families, but also to the discipline as a whole, as the best and the brightest leave for other more lucrative pursuits, and the standards we strive to maintain continue to fall.
Although presented here in a somewhat alarmist and simplified form, this process is no mere fantasy. There is evidence of its occurrence – in one form or another – from numerous lands.
The question is: how did we get here? Is there anything specific to archaeology which could be identified as having brought about the present crisis?

First causes

Mention has been made of the difference between degrees of popular support for environmental and heritage preservation issues. This is not meant to detract from the obviously greater importance of the former, but rather to underline the fact that the “green” movement has enjoyed greater success in political terms than has the “archaeological lobby.”
One reason for this might be public perception. Although archaeologists think of themselves as scientists or – at the very least – as academics and serious scholars (while engineers and construction crews are looked upon as being the cretins who destroy unique and valuable monuments), the public sees things differently. Whereas historians are generally regarded as scholars, and geologists as scientists, archaeologists are seen to be adventurers (Indiana Jones) and treasure hunters (Lara Croft). It should be useful to bear these comparisons in mind when considering the consequences of our actions. On a rescue excavation, for example, an investor might be expected to pay for serious scientific research into some aspect of cultural heritage, but why should he subsidise Indiana Jones' latest adventure (i.e. a rescue excavation done to poor standards)? If construction crews (all trained professionals) use the latest surveying equipment, how can the so-called scientists perform their documentation with a few pieces of string and some nails?
This is ultimately a question of respect, and somewhat ironic in that gaining respect has been a goal since the first archaeologists began to distance themselves from antiquarianism. In a process remarkably similar to the later revolution associated with the “new archaeology” of the 1960s, the first “scientific” archaeologists wanted to be relevant to both the public and their peers in academia. In order to fulfill that goal they needed a scientific model to emulate, and chose the then-popular discipline of geology.
Around the 1960s archaeology underwent changes which were equally profound while establishing itself as a profession outside of academia; moving away from an eccentric pursuit for woolly-headed dilettantes into a technophile age, an age of social upheavals and radical restructuring of the systems of higher education. It might also have made sense to shift loyalties away from quaint old stratigraphic geology to something with-it, hip, and up-to-date. Something more like physics, with its natural laws; something that might win us some respect…
Somehow that failed, and somehow post-processualists’ attempts to right the wrongs of their processualist predecessors only served to exacerbate the problem, alienating with a shift to a paradigm derived from literary criticism... And somehow this all suggests that archaeology’s lack of public support might reflect a major failing in our attempts to explain ourselves; among other things, to explain why archaeology is relevant not just to archaeologists but to everyone.
In order to explain why this happened, and begin to outline a solution, we might begin with a very fundamental – but seemingly paradoxical – question:

What is archaeology?

The problem addressed here – very real but rarely approached with sufficient candor – is that archaeology has developed neither unified, pan-national method nor theory. Whereas one might speak of organic and inorganic – but not of German and British – chemistry, disciplinary differences between British archaeology and German Archäologie (concerned mostly with Classical Antiquity) or Vor- und Frühgeschichte (early- and prehistory) are very real. As a result, even something as apparently straightforward as site documentation was never fully systematized in the way that allows chemists the world over to speak of the same elements and compounds.
The situation is further complicated by divisions between research and rescue archaeology; between academics, civil servants and commercial enterprise; and across the very fractured landscape populated by the multiple narratives championed by post-processualist theory.
It is suggested that the existentialist crisis currently facing archaeology results in part from this disunity; that we might be better able to help ourselves and – in turn – to generate a greater degree of public (and, by implication, political) support if we were not so disorganized. As the saying goes: united we stand, divided we fall.
For present purposes, archaeology will be defined as being both a body of knowledge about the human past, and the methodologies used for obtaining that knowledge. Like geology (which is concerned with the non-human past) but in contrast to history (where the past is investigated using written documents), archaeology is primarily concerned with information gained from material objects (including their context and relationships). In this, it might be seen as a study of Material Culture (if that term didn’t already suffer from Soviet connotations).
How knowledge of the past is weaned from those material remains – a process covered by such labels as middle-range theory, inference, or any of a large number of variants – runs parallel to similar debates occurring in other disciplines, and is ultimately philosophical, not archaeological in nature. Hence it should not consume as much thought and energy as is presently the case, and solutions should be sought which are not specific to archaeology alone.
That being said, it is a problem which leads to another question which has yet to receive a conclusive answer:

Is archaeology a science?

On the surface this would seem to be simply a problem of classification, one which to some degree has been dismissed as trivial and/or irrelevant; a simple matter for university administrators to locate departments of archaeology within one faculty or another. This dismissal would appear to represent a form of category mistake, however, manifest in various ways. When Evžen Neustupný and Glynn Isaac, for example, wrote their award-winning “Whither Archaeology” papers about the need to use more “natural science” approaches, this really should not have been an issue, and only serves to underline the degree to which archaeologists misunderstand the scientific process.
For example, in The Archaeological Process Ian Hodder repeats the argument that excavation is not repeatable, therefore implying that it is not scientific. This is meant to be a criticism of those processualists who tried to turn archaeological fieldwork into a series of experiments, but ignores the fact that, for example, observations of the Shoemaker-Levy comet crashing into Jupiter in 1994 were neither experimental nor reproducible – but scientific all the same.
In this sense, then, it might make sense to speak of two archaeologies: a natural scientific and a humanistic (or social scientific, or hermeneutic). One deals with objects, their materials and manufacture, their contexts and post-deposition; as a science it is primarily observational, but can include aspects which are experimental. The other deals with people, societies and cultures, and is primarily interpretive. That this dualistic structure neatly parallels that which was outlined in the previous section (material remains and the stories we tell about them; evidence and inference) would seem to lend credence to this proposal.
The only problem is that, although as a rhetorical device quite elegant, such a solution essentially constitutes an acceptance of the divisions denounced above, and should therefore be rejected.
Since the assumption being made in this present line of argument is that archaeology would somehow gain the respectability we crave if our work could only be perceived as being scientific (since arts and culture are an elitist luxury, while science is perceived to be necessary), one must wonder: what went wrong? One might have to reject the widely-held belief in the extent to which the birth of archaeology was in some way a rejection of the antiquarian past, since the new archaeology might also be seen as an attempt to bring to completion processes which had only been set in motion over the course of the 19th century. It might be argued that the methods and aims of the “old archaeology” were – despite statements to the contrary – strongly art-historical in nature, and that – until Binford came along – archaeology was still mired in what should have been its antiquarian past.
But whereas geology was founded on similar sort of dilettantism, the Geological Society of London, for example, was founded “for the purpose of making geologists acquainted with each other, of stimulating their zeal, of inducing them to adopt one nomenclature” (emphasis added). That this never happened may be evidenced by the fact that just in British archaeology there are contexts, layers, strata, entities, features, structures, context-series, groups, stratigraphic and excavation units; fills and deposits and sediments, etc., many of which are synonymous or hierarchically differentiated (a structure may contain several features, and a feature may be composed of different contexts, depending on which system is being used), but not systematically applied, satisfactorily defined or – quite often – supported by theory.
Is it any wonder then that archaeology is OK as entertainment, but less likely to garner the sort of public support enjoyed by whales, the rainforest and other fashionable causes?
As with everything else there are other explanations. Archaeologists are relatively few; we aren’t powerful politically on our own. We might also imagine a system model wherein our size as a community and our lack of resources keeps us from following Greenpeace’s lead in campaigning. If we did more marketing there would be more support for archaeology, there would be more archaeologists, and we could spend more time dealing with public relations…
And this all might come from spending too much time in the past, working with dead cultures, and not living with the present; being too ivory-towered, elitist, and cut off from the real world.
But these are all excuses, and bring us no closer to solution.

The problem

This discussion has been fairly dualistic; opposing material remains and archaeological interpretation, archaeologists and the public; perhaps an ideal and the reality, etc. And whereas one might normally seek to resolve these contradictions in a Hegelian synthesis, one of the propositions used in the present argument is that this process has failed, in that archaeologists and the public continue to have very different views about the value of archaeology.
One way out of this impasse is to shift the focus away from the quest for synthesis towards examining the bridge connecting archaeology and the public. Specifically the contract which formalizes relations between the two: legislation protecting cultural heritage. Now it might be imagined that legislation exists to protect the archaeological heritage from plunder and wanton development, but it also protects against destruction caused by archaeologists.
No man is an island; archeologists do not work in isolation, and should be held accountable for actions which impact sites with which they are entrusted. It must be remembered that a site can only be excavated once. Once it has been destroyed, it is gone forever. Mention has been made of the role reproducibility plays in judging whether something was a science or not, and it might be argued that archaeologists have hidden behind this test as a way to hide from certain (albeit often unrecognized) responsibilities. If it’s not science, then it need not be excavated to scientific standards.
But just as a site can only be excavated once, so is an autopsy a unique event, which may be performed once and once only. The latter has not only a scientific but also a legal status, as the evidence obtained may have to be presented in court.
Archaeology, in contrast, often has no such legal dimension. Not in the obligation to make information publicly available, nor to conform to certain methodological standards. This may have been acceptable to an earlier age, but not one where we recognize the archaeology to be “of fundamental importance to humanity” (ICOMOS 1990).
Again we look to the environmental movement, not just as a success story, but for systems-oriented ecological models which show how fresh air, clean water and species extinctions effect us all. There are also other precedents: just as the case Mr. David Irving v Penguin Books and Deborah Lipstadt brought down a legal standard for writing history, the British concept of “preservation by record” goes some way towards pointing the way forward. The problem here is that “preservation by record” does not yet seem to have been defined in terms of legally recognized norms or standards.
It might also be argued that the existence of laws protecting archaeological legislation undermines one of the major premises of this present argument; indicates a greater degree of support for heritage conservation than allowed for by this present, dismal theory. This fails to recognize the diversity in heritage legislation; laws which protect “pre-Roman” sites, or only those sites which are visible above the surface of the ground but little else, etc.
And besides: mere protection isn’t everything, for destruction by development continues apace, despite existing legislation. There needs to be a wider framework, a system promoting preservation.
For example: the principle commonly known as "polluter pays", is not only a means of shifting costs from strained public purse, but also intended to act as a deterrent to unnecessary destruction of the cultural landscape. Although current legislation often includes provisions ensuring that costs for rescue excavations and other fieldwork are paid for by the investor, ideally (as in the European Treaty of Malta [Council of Europe 1992]) provision should be made for taking a wider, holistic view, recognising that the archaeological process does not begin and end with fieldwork, but is continuous, and includes post-excavation and other analysis (and their associated costs).
To some degree this latter might be seen as recognition not only of a scientific framework which – to a large extent – has not been reflected in the legal system nor – as argued above – in archaeological method and theory.
Ideally, the end result would be dynamic, synergistic: increased public understanding leading to increased public and private support for conservation measures.

Conclusions

As stated at the outset, there are many ways of answering the question of what the future holds for archaeology. In keeping with the retrospective stance used when announcing the present competition, one might have continued the trend set by our predecessors, Neustupný and Isaac. It might be worth recalling, however, that Antiquity’s “Whither Archaeology” competition elicited responses to Jacquetta Hawkes’ critique of then-current trends. Since it is not clear whether the current post-processualist paradigm needs to be attacked or defended yet again, this approach is not comparable to present circumstances.
It also might be noted how quaint – and commonsensical – Neustupný and Isaac’s defense of ever-greater use of statistical methods seem in hindsight, and that their failure to recognize the changes widespread access to computers would soon bring (Isaac makes only token mention of computing) appears shortsighted.
And this is surely not the wide-ranging vision we aim for.
Similarly, the future course of certain developments can be taken pretty much for granted, while others can only be seen dimly through our crystal ball. On the one hand, the ever-increased application of technology, for example, which will not only speed documentation and increase accuracy but allow more in-depth analysis and dissemination (e.g., publication of entire site archives on the internet), etc., requires no more than brief acknowledgment. On the other, who could have envisioned the full potential for GIS or internet 10 or 20 years ago?
A purely theoretical approach also seems unproductive, in part because the type of favoritism brought into play when choosing one strand over another (gender vs. landscape, for example) must necessarily lead to some form of subjective ranking as at a beauty pageant, while projecting present trends towards post-processual multivocality foresees – reductio ad absurdum – an ever-greater degree of fragmentation of the sort decried above.
One must maintain a sense of scale or be subject to the law of diminishing returns. It is undeniable that – in contrast to the monoglot view of the past in days of yore – the multiple perspectives recognized by post-processualist thought have brought a wider, more inclusive (and perhaps more complete) framework for archaeological interpretation. The question only remains of how far this process can go before becoming counterproductive, to actually harming archaeology as a discipline.
Lest we forget, the threats facing archaeology are not all external; we can also be our own worst enemy …
Overall, the preceding should be seen as a cry for a proactive – not merely reactive – archaeology. By reestablishing the discipline upon firmer foundations, the future could be ours to make.

References

Aitchison, Kenneth. 1999. Profiling the Profession: a survey of archaeological jobs in the UK. Council for British Archaeology, English Heritage and the Institute of Field Archaeologists, London,
Barker, Philip. 1998.Techniques of archaeological excavation. London: Routledge.
Chadwick, Adrian. 1997. “ARCHAEOLOGY AT THE EDGE OF CHAOS:
FURTHER TOWARDS REFLEXIVE EXCAVATION METHODOLOGIES.” Assemblage 3.
Chadwick, Adrian. 2000. “TAKING ENGLISH ARCHAEOLOGY INTO THE NEXT MILLENNIUM - A PERSONAL REVIEW OF THE STATE OF THE ART.” Assemblage 5.
Council of Europe. 1992. European Convention on the Protection of the Archaeological Heritage; ETS No. 143. Valetta, 16.I.1992.
Geological Society. A brief history of The Geological Society of London; http://www.geolsoc.org.uk/template.cfm?name=archives_geolsochistory.
Hodder, Ian. 1999. The archaeological process: an introduction. Oxford: Blackwell.
ICOMOS. 1990. Charter for the Protection and Management of the Archaeological Heritage.
Redman, Charles L. 1999. “The development of archaeological theory: explaining the past.” In G. Barker (Ed.), Companion Encyclopedia of Archaeology, vol. 1, pp. 48-80. London: Routledge.
Winchester, Simon. 2001. The map that changed the world. New York: HarperCollins.

Geoff Carver