Photo: Gabriele Ribon ("Water")Source: http://www.gabrielerigon.it
Archaeology’s Achilles heel: overcoming the concept of “material culture”
I am very critical a propos of the concept of material culture and even of materiality.
In fact, to distinguish between a material world (objects) and a non-material one (ideas, etc.) seems to me very much in the Western dichotomic tradition coming from the Greeks, and accentuated with Descartes cogito, etc. This dichotomy has no meaning for the most of cultures living or extinct. It is a peculiarity (we could call it exoticism) of our own, it seems.
In archaeology, the so called material culture has been the focus of attention of a particular standpoint, that of cognitive processual archaeology. In a way, every interesting archaeologist was always concerned with “discovering” the so called “subject” and/or the so called “system” behind the “artifact”. The problem is the very status of those concepts, namely the artifact (whatever it is, from a stone axe to an entire city), which archaeology has tended to look at as the product of a something previously “worked out” in the mind...a project... that is then materialized in the physical world.
So archaeologists have dreamed of reaching an improvement of knowledge by coming in the reverse sense, from the material world of the past (the remains of something) to the building of an “interpretation” (narrative of that past, its meaning, i. e., inspired by the very idea of God’s omniscience, etc.).
This is the foundational myth of archaeology. Its Achilles heel. We need to overcome it and to build a post-positivistic archaeology, located in the present.
I am very critical a propos of the concept of material culture and even of materiality.
In fact, to distinguish between a material world (objects) and a non-material one (ideas, etc.) seems to me very much in the Western dichotomic tradition coming from the Greeks, and accentuated with Descartes cogito, etc. This dichotomy has no meaning for the most of cultures living or extinct. It is a peculiarity (we could call it exoticism) of our own, it seems.
In archaeology, the so called material culture has been the focus of attention of a particular standpoint, that of cognitive processual archaeology. In a way, every interesting archaeologist was always concerned with “discovering” the so called “subject” and/or the so called “system” behind the “artifact”. The problem is the very status of those concepts, namely the artifact (whatever it is, from a stone axe to an entire city), which archaeology has tended to look at as the product of a something previously “worked out” in the mind...a project... that is then materialized in the physical world.
So archaeologists have dreamed of reaching an improvement of knowledge by coming in the reverse sense, from the material world of the past (the remains of something) to the building of an “interpretation” (narrative of that past, its meaning, i. e., inspired by the very idea of God’s omniscience, etc.).
This is the foundational myth of archaeology. Its Achilles heel. We need to overcome it and to build a post-positivistic archaeology, located in the present.
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